I am very much concerned about my productivity all the time. I have recently come across this beautiful chrome extension Limitless
But this is only measuring what i'm doing within the chrome application. As I work most of the time with pdfs, videos etc, I want to develop similar application for linux(ubuntu) desktop enviroment.
Basically I want the script to run continuously as long as the workstation is on.
It should be able to know what I'm currently looking at (for eg a pdf file or a lecture video in vlc) and get the name of the respective file, start time, end times etc and finally post to db.
It is better if it could know if the system is idle or at sleep.
I don't have slightest clue at bash scripting. so my questions is could this task be accomplished with python.
What I've tried?
I started with a search in google "get current application python", "current window title python" etc etc and really surprised to see absurd results.
Please give me pointers on this.
I think you are asking for vocabulary. So I give you what I know.
You are using Ubuntu so your Window Manager may be Gnome.
The window manager knows which window has the focus.
So maybe you want to find out which window has the focus and you want to map it to the Process that opened the window.
What you need to focus on is is module for Python or a Python Binding for the window manager. This module is likely to also be able to control the windows.
The window manager is started with startx.
You could try to call a command line tool and catch the results
How do get the process list on command line:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53489/how-do-you-list-all-processes-on-the-command-line-in-windows
And how to call a tool with python:
Python subprocess.call and subprocess.Popen stdout
[edit] Repeating the call in Intervals and counting the intervals a process were running gives you a good estimation of running time of a process...
[edit2] As GreenAsJade said, you search a way to find out which windows has the focus.
See How do I detect the currently focused application?
Related
So, the shop where I work use Excel 4.0 for all its inventory management and orders.
Since the guy before me left without explaining anything, I inherited an old system that works, but is... eh.
The bosses don't want to change to a new Excel nor another program, so I must do what I can with what I have.
Now, I've made a script in python 2.5.4 (this version is needed because the newer versions won't work on the Windows 98 computer they use...) to automate some processes that would be impossible with Excel 4.0 macros, and the script works perfectly for what I need.
But since the bosses want to "only work with Excel", and won't want to go outside of Excel and click the script icon to start it (or, heaven forbid, open cmd and start it manually), I would need to put a button in Excel to start the script.
I've tried to sift through the macros available, but except perhaps "Initiate" (which I don't wholly understand as of now), I can't think of a macro to interact with the script, and haven't found much help with what's available online...
SO, could anyone please help me in making the macro for the button? The only thing the button would need to do is to start the python script, there's no other interactions needed, the rest is done by the script.
Like, the script "foo.py" is in the same folder as "bar.xls", and I only need a button in "bar.xls" to launch "foo.py".
Thanks.
Okay, I found a roundabout way, so I'm gonna share it with y'all.
MacroName
=LAUNCH("cmd",1)
=SEND.KEYS("foo.py~";TRUE)
=SEND.KEYS("exit~")
=RETURN()
It opens a cmd instance, show it for a split second (can't use SEND.KEYS without it being the active app), writes the name of the python script and presses enter, before quitting.
I would like if it didn't need to show the cmd window, but it works for now. Perhaps there'll be another way, but if anyone else wanna do what I did, it does work.
You probably need to get the book out - Excel 4 came with one book called the Function Reference which listed all the commands available.
Commands that we used back in the day were:
EXEC: starts another program
EXECUTE: runs commands in another program called by Initiate
INITIATE: sets a channel to a program
SEND.KEYS: sends keystrokes to a program (we used to send data to a slow server this way...)
Not sure what will be on the web for Excel macro 4, it was retired as vba came out and Excel moved over...
I still use my copy of the book, but it would be worth finding, although the help should list the commands as well. I just used the book as I had macros running...
I found a way to start a behaviour by creating a dialog in Choregraphe, but it does not work.
The script of the dialog is the following:
u(keyword / key sentence): robot_response (optional)
^start(applicationID/behaviour_1)
^wait(applicationID/behaviour_1)
The robot (NAO, version 2.8.6.23) catches my keyword, says the expected response, but the behaviour does not start: the robot goes into stand-by and I have often to restart it. Anyway, the application seems to be running (by looking at active content). I tried to run manually the behaviour and it works well, so I don't understand what I'm doing wrong...
PS: Both the application and the dialog are installed on robot applications, of course.
Does your other behavior use dialogue? What could be happening is that applicationID/behaviour_1 tries to start listening / activate dialogue, and fails right away because there is already a dialogue running (the one you showed us).
^start is intended for simple behaviors like animations, if you want to actually launch another activity with it's own logic etc. you should use ^switchFocus instead of ^start - what that will do is stop your current behavior that has this dialogue (so, no need for the ^wait), and start a new one. This will only work if Autonomous Life is active - Autonomous Life's job is to orchestrate activities so that only one is active at a given time, to prevent bugs caused by a bit of background code in one behavior causing problems in another.
("activities" are basically behaviors that are intended to be "top level", like applications or games, as opposed to little things like animations that are fine to run in the background)
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.
SO I am infact doing something very similar to this user posts:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6800292/python-ai-and-3d-animation
but it has no answers and I couldn't contact the user.
Basically I have a functioning python script that answers me with an action accordingly to my voice command. (Fetch emails, weather forecast, turn lights ON/OFF, etc), it has been made using the pyspeech library which is pretty darn good.
Now I want to give my programm a "face"! I thought about modelling the face with Blender (have some knowledge and would build up on it) and I know I could animate it, so the lips move and such.
So I want to know if it is at all possible to:
Load the "face" that I made from blender from my main python script (so when my programm start the face would be there on the screen too)
Run from the script the animations such that when for example when my programm says "You're welcome" I would run the animation that the lips move on the face to simulate it is speaking.
I know that blender has a good python integration (maybe correct is to say it is built on?) and that is why I thought it would be a good program to use.
Hope someone can help and tell me if that is at all possible and maybe show me some right way to go, my googling just showed me always python scripting with Blender which is not what I exactly need here... I think...
Cheers,
Flavio
Indeed, what you want is possible.
If all you want is to play pre-rendered animation videos based on decisions on your program, any GUI that allows you to embedd and play video in a widget will do for your application.
You could rool out your own GUI using Pygame (which has video support, but you will need one of the "minor" more or less "amateur" widget toolkits made for pygame to make up the remaining of your application, as pygame is pretty low level.
On a higher level, although I'had not embedded video, I think you could go with PyQT4 (googled a bit, not that many examples either, buthints that there are eamples in QT4 source) or GTK+ (the samething, it looks like there are more examples).
Another option would be to build your application to run inside the Blener Game Engine itself - It offers both a high level Toolkit, and ways to customize behaviors to user actions (even without coding).
The major drawback in doing this is: I don't know which are the options to distribute an application that needs Blender Game Engine nowadays - your users will need to install Blender (but it is likely Blender folks made an easy way to jhandle this).
On the upper hand: you get the most flexibility, it would even be possible to render some sequences in realtime (as opposed to pre-rendered videos) in your app.
One thing: Blender nowadays use Python 3.x - if the other libraries you need are Python 2, you willl need to make one different process for the GUI inside Blender, and exchange data with your application's backeend in Python 2 (for example using jsonrpc or xmlrpc - that is enoguh simple in Python).
I'd like to know how to have a program wait for another program to finish a task. I'm not sure what I'd look for for that...
Also, I'm using a mac.
I'd like to use Python or perhaps even applescript (I could just osascript python if the solution if for applescript anyway)
Basically this program "MPEGstreamclip" converts videos, and it opens what appears to be 2 new windows while it's converting. One window is a conversion progress bar, and the other window is a preview of the conversion. (Not sure if these actually count as windows)
(Also, MPEGstreamclip does not have an applescript dictionary, so as far as I know, it can't listen for certain window names existence)
But basically I want my program to listen for when MPEGstreamclip is done, and then run its tasks.
If it helps, when the conversion is done, the mpegstreamclip icon in the dock bounces once. I'm not sure what that means but I'd think you could use that to trigger something couldn't you?
Thanks!
I realized GUI applescript was the answer in this scenario. With it I could tell the PROCESS to get every window, and that worked. However, I'm leaving this up because I'd like to know other ways. I'm sure this GUI workaround won't work for everything.
If the MPEGstreamclip actually ends when it is done, you could wrap the whole thing up in a python script using various techniques already discussed in another post. Just be sure to wait for the external process to end before continuing with your other steps.