I'm trying to implement numpad in PyQt5 and Windows 10. There are buttons 1, 2, ... 9, enter
I'd like to implement the following event:
When user clicks for example on button 1, the character '1' will be sent to background application (for example notepad).
I have done simple GUI. I only need to implement this event. What libraries, functions can I use to this purpose?
You should research how Inter-process communication works and APIs.
You did not specify which Operating System you target, each one has its own ways to do it.
You mention "sending characters to notepad" but which application do you plan to communicate with ? Because working with any application may be a very difficult problem.
For Notepad I found this question that uses the Windows API to communicate, but it was relatively easy because the source language was C# (which is well-integrated with Windows). According to this other question you should use PyWin32 to do that in Python.
But if you plan your NumPad application to work with many other applications, you should look how other Input sofwares work. It may have clues how to do it.
Related
As the title explain, i'm trying to use the terminal to send commands as keystrokes to a GUI application that's minimized.
There is a lot of similar questions here on Stack with some great answers, but i'm having, mainly, three problems with the solutions i saw: Most of the solutions need the automated application to be the active one. Or, i can't normally use my keyboard while the script/process is running. Or worse, the solution works only on Windows OS.
I need what this person asked 2 months ago: Send keystrokes to a specific window (in background), but do something else in the meantime
But i want it on Linux.
I'm using Kubuntu 18.10, if that helps.
xdotool was close, but i couldn't quite get it to send the commands to a specific window or PID. It also uses "my keyboard", so i can't, for example, write an essay/code/browse online while xdotool is running. Pexpect also have this last problem.
AutoHotKey looks like it would work, but it's only for Windows and i'm trying to not use Wine. Same with pywin32.
keyboard (https://github.com/boppreh/keyboard) seems nice, but it can't send a command to a specific application. Same with PyAutoGUI.
I selected the Python tag because most of the solutions i saw use Python, but i'm open to any language.
Use a nested X server to input keystrokes without changing focus or keyboard grab.
Proof of concept:
Xephyr -resizeable :13
export DISPLAY=:13
xterm
xdotool type rhabarber
The Xephyr nested X server is started and will listen on local X socket 13 (whereas :0 typically identifies the currently running X server, but when multiple sessions are ran concurrently, it could be higher).
Then we set DISPLAY environment variable to :13, so any X application we start will connect to Xephyr; xterm is our target application here. Using xdotool or any other tool we can send keystrokes.
As the target X server is identified through $DISPLAY, applications can be started or input events triggered from elsewhere as well. If needed, you might also run a lightweight window manager within Xephyr, e.g. to 'maximize' the application so that it fills the whole Xephyr window.
I want to automate one of my tasks, by changing a third-party GUI/MFC application's properties as per my requirements. Every time I need to carry out any testing, I need to change the properties of the application to test my software.
I tried to automate it by using Python and IronPython. After Googling a lot I found IronPython, because the GUI is written C# and VB.NET.
Suppose when opening the GUI in its editor it gives me the option to edit the properties, MFC contains lots of controls.. e.g.:
Enter Time |__| //Need to enter the value in the box
Enter the dealy |__| //Need to enter the value in the box
Want to display |_| //Check box , check or uncheck
some Radio buttons.
Some more controls.
....
....
I want to control all the changes from my Python script. I will just enter the value from my script and it will update them in the GUI.
I wrote a script in IronPython to read the GUI:
fw = open("MyFile.vnb", 'r')
for line in fw.readlines():
print (line)
I found plenty of encrypted/encoded characters along with some of the C#/VB.NET codes in the console. So, I am completely stuck here.
I would like to know can we edit a third-party GUI with Python/IronPython or not? Do I need to use some special tools from Python to edit the GUI?
If you need classic GUI automation you can control MFC application by pywinauto library. You can send keyboard events, mouse clicks, moves etc. pywinauto has also limited support for .NET controls (simple automation like buttons, text boxes etc. is available). I guess this is realistic task (see sample video by the link above).
But if you need some binary instrumentation to change the GUI executable permanently (it sounds strange), this is completely another topic. Read about PIN tool. It's used for profilers development, for example. Collecting stack samples, unwinding call stacks and other tricky reverse engineering things. :)
I am writing long running program with simple GUI, the 99% of time I would like the program to work only as process, however sometimes I want to check the status, so is it possible to capture the keypress event in python?
For example I want to show the program window when I press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Q, I expect to use app on Windows
Thank you
There are tutorials on how to create a key-logger with Python. They should help. But I do not know if that is the right way to go.
Also you could register shortcuts under a key combination on Windows.
You should be aware that Ctrl+Shift+Alt are handled independent of the keyboard layout and Q changes with the language.
With pywin32 you should be able to do that using Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F1 for example.
I am thinking of writing a python program that runs in the background and can inspect user's GUI events.
My requirements is very simple:
1) When user right click the mouse, it can show an option; and when this option is chosen, my program should know this event.
2) When user select a file and click some predefined key combination, my program should know this event.
What should I do? Is this a GUI program? I am also thinking that, this program maybe a daemon on the machine and can inspect the user's GUI event, but I am not sure how can I do this.
Thanks.
If you're talking about doing this stuff inside of a wxPython program, then it's all pretty simple. There's a PopupMenu widget for the first one and an AcceratorTable for the second one. If you're wanting to catch mouse and keyboard events outside of a wxPython program, then you have to go very low-level and hook into the OS itself, which means that there really isn't any good way to do it cross-platform. You'll probably want to look at ctypes and similar libraries for that sort of thing.
I've been researching this problem a bit and while I don't have a definite answer, I thought it would be good to share what I found.
First, according to the answers for this question, wxPython cannot track nor control the mouse position outside of the area controlled by the wxPython app. However, as we can see in the answers to this question, under certain circumstances it may be possible to create system-wide hot keys that wxPython can see (although we can also see that this is probably not the optimal solution).
So what will work for the OP? Well, build a cross platform application that does what the OP wants seems almost impossible so I will assume the OP is developing for MS Windows. Following the suggestions in those previous two questions, I looked into the PyWin32 API. It's a little hard to find documentation for it but this question offers some helpful links. A little more digging and I found this tutorial for system-wide hotkeys as well as the win32event.WaitForMultipleObjects and win32event.WaitForSingleObject methods which, if the OP can figure out the proper event, may be what the OP needs to catch menu clicks.
I know it's far from a complete answer but hopefully this can serve as a good jumping-off point for further research.
I'm automating some common GUI tasks I have to do in an application, and I'm using a Python program and SendKeys to do it. So far I've had to activate the application I'm sending keys to (since SendKeys just sends the keystrokes to the active window), but I'd like to be able to send keystrokes to an application in the background. Is there a way to do that, or am I dreaming an impossible dream?
Thanks for your help.
pywinauto is another MS-only GUI automation tool, this one written in Python.
SendKeys is a Python module for Windows that can send one or more keystrokes or keystroke combinations to the active window.
If you need to do some automated work in the background, make another user/session and do it in that.
However if you must do something of this like on windows, I always reach for autoit.
It's M$ only and perfectly suited to automating tasks on that OS.
This is a frequent question in the autohotkey.com forums. Search under
"sending commands to controls". Basically, if you have the control ID, then it doesn't need to be visible in order to operate on it. There're more details on the forums.
good luck!