Develop Reference

Cannot find .exe with Pywinauto's find_window(title="program.exe")

Does anyone know the trick to pywinauto's find_window function? I am building an application with kivy, and trying to use pywinauto to bring an .exe to the foreground, using the following code:
SetForegroundWindow(find_window(title='program.exe'))
I simply want to identify a currently open .exe, and bring it to the foreground. I have looked here https://pywinauto.github.io/docs/code/pywinauto.findwindows.html and it seems "title=" is what I want.
Does anyone know how to point to the .exe with pywinauto?

I think title is for window title (i.e. "python - Cannot find..." in case of this tab), are you sure it not more like "process='program.exe'" ?
if it needs to be and int then its pid (process id) and you can use this to get process id by title:
import win32gui,win32process
def get_window_pid(title):
hwnd = win32gui.FindWindow(None, title)
threadid,pid = win32process.GetWindowThreadProcessId(hwnd)
return pid
Eventually have at this answer as it contains really nice class for getting windows Python Window Activation, i dont want to copy paste, but use it and then you can do:
w = WindowMgr()
w.find_window_wildcard(".*Hello.*")
w.set_foreground()

find_window is low level function I wouldn’t recommend to use.
The right thing is Application object connected to the target process. It can be used so:
from pywinauto import Application
app = Application(backend=“uia”).connect(path=“program.exe”)
app.WindowTitle.set_focus()
If you have several app instances, there is a Desktop object to walk all the windows in the system:
from pywinauto import Desktop
Desktop(backend=“win32”).window(title=“Window Title”, found_index=0).set_focus()
You referred to the old docs for version 0.5.4, the latest one is 0.6.4 with two backends available and many bug fixes. The Getting Started Guide link on the main page is a good source to learn the main concept.

pywebkitgtk: Headless + full DOM interaction possible?

I am currently using the Python Webkit DOM Bindings to interact with a website programmatically and that's working for me.
The only problem is that it insists on opening a GTK window to display the page. Has somebody figured out a way to prevent it from opening a window? I.e. to use it in a headless way?
I'm initializing the view like this:
wv = pywebkitgtk.WebView(1024, 768, url=url)
which implicitly opens the GTK window and then I have an onload event-handler to manipulate the DOM.
I first thought of subclassing WebView, but that's not possible because it is a compiled class.
Any other ideas?

I'm the developer responsible for pythonwebkit, and I have a great deal of expertise covering these areas across several platforms. Realistically, you really, really want a completely "headless" WebKit port. In pythonwebkit that actually shouldn't be too hard to do, as there are only three "entry point" functions (one for window, one for document, and one for XMLHTTPRequest).
Really, somebody should do a proper "completely headless" port of WebKit. There already is an example program which is pretty close in WebKit's source tree, maybe that will get you started.

I've been using PyQT. PyQTWebView runs on Webkit and works great. Check out Ghost.py to get started, or use PyQT's API directly. Runs fully headless, and supports a decently recent build of Webkit.

You could try using Xvfb. I like using the command line and setting my display manually, but if you don't like that you could use this: http://cgoldberg.github.io/xvfbwrapper/

Can you get a handle to the GTK window and then call window.hide()? Otherwise, you might just have to use the full Webkit library.

Create a window and add the webview there, and never show the window..
I have webviews running without showing them, and can call a show_all if I need to show them.
web_view = pywebkitgtk.WebView()
window = gtk.Window(gtk.WINDOW_TOPLEVEL)
sw = gtk.ScrolledWindow(hadjustment=None, vadjustment=None)
sw.set_policy(gtk.POLICY_NEVER, gtk.POLICY_NEVER)
sw.add(web_view)
window.add(sw)
#window.show_all()

How do I get a list of all windows on my gnome2 desktop using pygtk?

I'm a bit confused with some gtk and gnome concepts. I'm trying to get list of non minimized windows on my gnome2 desktop, but after reading the pygtk documentation and inspecting the results, I can't understand the results.
Neither of the two snippets below appears to work.
First I tried this..
>>> gtk.gdk.window_get_toplevels()
[<gtk.gdk.Window object at 0xb74339b4 (GdkWindow at 0x8a4c170)>]
>>> gtk.gdk.window_get_toplevels()[0].get_children()
[]
then this
>>> d = gtk.gdk.DisplayManager()
>>> d.get_default_display().get_screen(0).get_root_window().get_children()
[<gtk.gdk.Window object at 0x89dcc84 (GdkWindow at 0x8a4c170)>, <gtk.gdk.Window object at 0x89dccac (GdkWindow at 0x8a4c0c0)>]
As seen in the console output, the second option returns two windows. But I haven't been able to figure out what they are. None of them has any children and I allways get those two windows regardless how many windows I have on my desktop.
Could anybody explain the hierarchy of objects of the typical gtk based desktop environment?
I can't understand why the above code doesn't work.
Please refrain from posting alternative solutions that resource to wnck, xlib, qt, etc. I'm more interested in understanding what I am doing wrong than in getting advice such us checking other libraries.

Your constraint is like saying "I want to build a CD player using only a banana. Please refrain from posting alternative solutions that resort to lasers." GTK can't do that, you're using the wrong tool for the job.
Here's an explanation of what a "window" actually means and why your code doesn't work:
First off, you need to understand the difference between a gtk.Window and a gtk.gdk.Window. A GTK window is a top level GTK widget that can contain other widgets. It is usually linked to a window on your desktop, but doesn't have to be - in GTK 3 there is an OffscreenWindow.
A GDK window, on the other hand, is platform-dependent. On an X desktop it is a thin wrapper around an X window, which is not necessarily a toplevel desktop window. On other systems it exists to abstract away the windowing system. A GDK window receives events, so some GTK non-window widgets have their own GDK windows. "Window" is really a terrible name for these objects, but it was inherited from X and it's probably not going to change.
Each GTK process only knows about its own windows. You can get a list of the toplevel GTK windows of your own application using gtk.window_list_toplevels(). Getting the children of these windows should return you the GTK widgets that they contain. However, you can't descend into the widget hierarchy of other processes' windows. For example, what if another process has a window with a child widget that is a custom widget that your process doesn't know about? What should it report as the type of that widget?
Getting a list of the toplevel GDK windows with gtk.gdk.window_get_toplevels() is basically the same as getting a list of the toplevel X windows, as far as I understand it. You have no way of knowing what kind of windows they are - they might be the Gnome Panel, or they might be Qt windows, or they might be something else altogether that doesn't correspond with a desktop window.
Libwnck (link to the overview of what it does) can get you a list of non-minimized windows, and their titles, but it won't allow you to see inside them. There's no way to do that. Libwnck uses GDK internally, so technically you could do it using GDK, but why would you bother if there's already a library that does that for you? If you really want to do it yourself, look at the libwnck source code.

The windows you get are the windows that were created within your process. To get the list of windows, you need to query the properties of the root window, like this:
import gtk.gdk
root = gtk.gdk.get_default_root_window()
for id in root.property_get('_NET_CLIENT_LIST')[2]:
w = gtk.gdk.window_foreign_new(id)
if w:
print(w.property_get('WM_NAME')[2])
Please note that GDK is a thin layer over underlying OS graphics engine (X11/Quartz/Aqua/GDI etc) and result may differ on different NIX devices.

Tkinter: How to make a system tray application?

i have a small application. I want my target users(windows,linux) to be able to start and exit the application from the system tray. I intend to use Tkinter because of its low footprint but, i dont know how to implement it.
Can tkinter do this or are there better alternatives. I need a GUI library that won't change my 1MB program to a 5MB program.
Please sample codes will be appreciated
Thanks

I don't know any direct examples but I found a TCL/Tk extension to use the systray over here http://wiki.tcl.tk/4090 and a page on the wiki giving information on how to use TCL/Tk extensions from Tkinter.
On a more general note, you might want to consider using a more "advanced" toolkit (like wx) that provides things like systray usage etc. natively.

how to embed a webpage using wx?

I need to show a webpage (a complex page with script and stuff, no static html) in a frame or something. It's for a desktop application, I'm using python 2.6 + wxPython 2.8.10.1. I need to catch some events too (mostly about changing page). I've found some samples using the webview module in a gtk application, but I couldn't have it works on wx.

You can embed IE, but I think that's about it. wxWebKit is working on a wx add-on to use WebKit as an embedded browser in wx, but I think it's still a work in progress.

There is a commercial solution for this called wxWebConnect that uses Gecko (the Mozilla engine). I've never used it myself because i'm waiting for the wxWebKit project to be ready to use but it looks pretty good although perhaps a little overkill for your needs.