Because I really don't know a lot about this domain of programming, it might be clearer for me to explain what I would do if I were to input myself the commands I want to automatize (i.e. I just launch a script and all this procedure should be done automatically).
Lauch both the Game and the Task.
Start a game of the Game and immediately pause it.
Alt tab to the task.
Do it until a point determined in the program. At which point I am
told to switch to the game.
Alt tab to the game
Unpause it and start a clockwatch.
When the clockwatch reaches X minutes (X determined in advance),
pause the game.
Alt tab to the task.
Repeat steps 4-7 N number of times.
I have no idea whether it is possible or what tools to use. I understood that a simple bash file won't be enough and I might need to use a "fake keyboard" program to force some inputs (such as "space bar" to pause the game). But I have no idea how to coordinate all of that.
Thanks in advance for any help. Even telling me it's not possible is an acceptable answer :)
EDIT : Edited the list for clarity
From what information you have given, it is difficult to tell whether the complete process can be automated, but there are tools like AutoHotKey which you can use to write scripts to automate desktop applications.
A simple script in autohotkey to start a program "Notepad", another program "Calculater", and switch back to "Notepad" and write "Hello World!" in it.
SetTitleMatchMode, 2
Run "C:\Windows:\Notepad.exe"
Run "calc.exe"
WinActivate, Notepad
Send, Hello World!
The above is a very simple script. It does not activate the specific notepad window you want if multiple notepad windows are open. However, that can be automated too.
Related
You can start Windows programs minimized/maximized/hidden from outside the program. For example, from the command-line with start /max notepad or by setting the Run field for a shortcut in its Properties dialog. AutoHotkey also supports starting programs min/max/hidden with the Run command.
But how can an AutoHotkey script/program that has a GUI support this?
Here's a simple sample script:
gui,add,edit,w100 h100
gui,+resize
gui,show
Running the script will show a resizable window just big enough for the edit-control.
Running the script with start /max or any other method does NOT start it maximized (it doesn't matter if the script is compiled or not, it's the same result).
(Yes, it's possible to manually maximize the window or do it from the script, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have the GUI default to some size, but allow users to override it, like with other Windows programs.)
Does AutoHotkey support nShowCmd in WinMain? There don't seem to be any A_ variables that contain it. 🤔
What's the solution?
My approach would be something like this:
gui,add,edit,w100 h100
gui,+resize
gui,show
if InStr( A_args[1], "max")
WinMaximize, A
if InStr( A_args[1], "min")
WinMinimize, A
if InStr( A_args[1], "hid")
WinHide, A
Then you can:
Start script.ahk "maximized"
Or
Start script.ahk "minimized"
Or
Start script.ahk "hidden"
The argument dont need to be complete, if it contains "max", "min" or "hid" in it, it will work
To display dialogs from the command line I just use
$ osascript File.scpt
However, the progress bar feature isn't constrained to a dialog window because it adapts to the current application, e.g. a Finder window, where the progress updates are shown on the bottom of the window. File.scpt would look something like this.
set numUpdates to 100
set progress total steps to numUpdates
set progress completed steps to 0
set progress description to "Updating..."
set progress additional description to "Preparing to process."
set cycle to 1
repeat with a from 1 to numUpdates
# update description, completed steps, etc
end repeat
When I run my script from a terminal window, however, the script runs but nothing is shown to indicate the progress. Is there a way to force the progress bar to open as a new dialog or something along those lines without having to export the script as a ".app" file?
The reason Script Editor can display progress in its window and Terminal cannot is because Script Editor has its own extended scripting definition with the extra functions so when the script is run via script editor it has been programmed with the extra progress indicator but no other applications are sorry. The way I see it, you pretty much have 2 ways I can think of that will let you display "Progress" in AppleScript:
This is kinda ugly but I used to just have a transparent spinner gif file that will be displayed in a dialog which will give the affect that something is loading or working. and a single button saying Nothing or OK eg.
display dialog "Loading..." buttons:{"OK"} with icon ("/path/to/loader.gif" as POSIX file)
And if you wanna make it temporary just add giving up after (duration in seconds)
This is probably the best option but it is probably more complicated. I advise that you transfer to a programming language called "AppleScript Objective C" otherwise known as "Cocoa AppleScript". This allows you to use the basic AppleScript commands with Cocoa Windows/Dialogs/etc including progress bars!. to start you off you should download Xcode and research AppleScript Objective C and perhaps stick to it. Its better than AppleScript but still has the same functions :)
I am trying to create a program which will have live updates from some data source. And I also want to wait for user input just like a normal terminal. Right now, whenever there is update, I will print the content and print the prompt message for input again which create something like this:
Enter command >
This is a live update message
Enter command >
This is a multi-line li......
......ve update message
Enter command > quit
Bye bye!
The problem is that for every live message I received, I will print it and the "Enter command >" will be displayed again again and again, which is not desired. I want the live update to be update on the main part of the terminal, while the "Enter command >" always stay at the bottom
The closest package I can found on Github is https://github.com/gizak/termui but most of the examples inside is trying to display text, gauge and graphs. So I am not quite sure how to get started.
Is there any package or example of the termui package to achieve this? Thank you.
With github.com/gizak/termui you're heading in the correct direction.
To understand why you can't get that
I want the live update to be update on the main part of the terminal, while the "Enter command >" always stay at the bottom
part sorted out, a little excursion to the history of computing is due. ;-)
The thing is, the mode your teminal emulator¹ works by default originated
in how computers would communicate to the operator in the era which predated
alphanumeric displays — they would print their responses using a line printer. Now think of it: a line printer works like this: it prints whatever is sent to it on a roll of paper. What was output, was output.
The new output always appears physically below the older.
When alphanumeric displays (screens) came into existence they
naturally continued to support this mode:
the line text to be output was rendered at the bottom of the screen
with the text above it scrolled upwards.
That's what you see in your typical terminal emulator all the time when you're working in the command line of a shell (such as bash) running by the emulator window.
This, default, work mode of a terminal is called "canonical" or "cooked".
Then came more advanced displays, for which it was possible to change
individual positions on the screen — identified by their column and
row numbers.
This changed the paradigm of how the information was output: the concept
of a so-called "full-screen application" was born.
Typical examples of them are text editors such as Vim and Emacs.
To support full-screen text output, terminals (and terminal emulators)
were adapted by implementing certain extensions to their protocols.
A full-screen application first requests the terminal to switch into another
mode called "raw", in which the terminal sends most of what is input by the
user directly to the program running on the terminal.
The program handles this input and orders the terminal where and what
to draw.
You can read this good summary
of the distinction between the both modes.
As you are supposedly suspecting by now, to be able to keep some block
of information at a certain fixed place of the terminal's text screen,
you want your program to be a full-screen program and use the terminal's
raw mode and its special commands allowing you to directly modify
text at certain character cells.
Now the problem is that different terminals (and terminal emulators)
have different commands to do that, so there exist libraries to isolate
the programs from these gory details. They rely on the special "terminal
information databases" to figure out what capabilities a terminal has
and how to make it do what the program asks.
See man terminfo for more background.
The most widely known such library (written in C) is called ncurses,
and there exist native solutions for Go with supposedly the most visible
one being github.com/nsf/termbox-go.
The github.com/gizak/termui makes use of termbox-go but for you it might
suffice to use the latter directly.
¹ Chances are very high you're not sitting at
a real hardware terminal
connected to a UNIX® machine but are rather working in a GUI application
such as GNOME Terminal or xterm or Termial.app etc.
These are not "terminals" per se but are rather
terminal emulators —
that is, pieces of software emulating a hardware terminal.
Is there a way in which I can debug my compiled Matlab components, using native Matlab debugger, like Visual Studio "Attach to process" option, or something like that?
I mean EXE stand-alone files, DLLs, COM in-process servers or .NET components.
You can't debug them in the sense of being able to step through the MATLAB code line by line, as you can with MATLAB's own debugger prior to compilation. One of the steps that the MATLAB deployment products take is to encrypt the MATLAB code (so you can preserve your IP when distributing the deployed component). The ability to step through the code in a debugger after deployment would defeat the purpose of that.
I experimented with using something like :
try
catch ME
waitbar(0,ME.message)
end
This was quite an effective and generic solution.
you may want to break down the code into multiple parts and debug each to save compiling time.
good luck,
dan
You can follow the instructions to debug:
Debugging:
Using the Debugging Tool will let you stop your program in mid-execution to examine the contents of variables and other things which can help you find mistakes in your program. M-file programs are stopped at "breakpoints". To create a breakpoint, simply press F12 and a red dot will appear next to the line where your cursor is. You can also click on the dash next to the line number on the left side of the M-file window to achieve the same result.
Then press F5 or Debug->Run from the menu to run the program. It will stop at the breakpoint with a green arrow next to it. You can then examine the contents of variables in the workspace, step, continue or stop your program using the Debug menu. To examine contents of a variable, simply type its name into the workspace, but be warned: you can only look at the values of variables in the file you stop in, so this means that you'll probably need multiple breakpoints to find the source of your problem. There are several different ways you can move through the program from a breakpoint. One way is to go through the whole program, line by line, entering every function that is called. This is effective if you don't know where the problem is. There's also a way to simply step through the function you're currently stopped in, one line at a time, and instead of going through the child functions line by line MATLAB will simply give you the results of those functions.
Finally, note that you cannot set a breakpoint until you save the M-file. If you change something, you must save before the breakpoint "notices" your changes. This situation is depicted in MATLAB by changing the dots from red to gray. Sometimes, you'll save but the dots will still be gray; this occurs when you have more than one breakpoint in multiple files. To get around this (which is really annoying), you have to keep going to "exit debug mode" until it turns gray. Once you're completely out of debug mode, your file will save and you'll be ready to start another round of debugging. Using comments to help you debug code. you want to test the effects of leaving out certain lines of code (to see, for example, if the program still returns Inf if you take them out), you can comment out the code. To do this, highlight it and then go to:
Text -> Comment
Or press CTRL+R. This will simply put a '%' in front of every line; if the line is already commented out it will put another '%' there so when you uncomment them the pattern of comment lines will not change. Commented lines will be ignored by the compiler, so the effect will be that the program is run without them.
To uncomment a line go to
Text -> Uncomment
Or press CTRL+T.
Another use of commenting is to test the difference between two different possible sets of code to do something (for example, you may want to test the effect of using ODE113 as opposed to ODE45 to solve a differential equation, so you'd have one line calling each). You can test the difference by commenting one out and running the program, then uncommenting that one and commenting the other one out, and calling the program again.
How to escape infinite loops?
MATLAB can't directly tell you you have an infinite loop, it does attempt to give you some hints. The first comes when you terminate the program. Terminate it by pressing CTRL+C and MATLAB will give you a message telling you exactly what line you stopped on. If your program is running a long time, it is likely the line you stopped in is in the middle of an infinite loop. sometimes MATLAB won't even let you return to the main window to press CTRL-C. In this case you probably have to kill the whole MATLAB process. After this, add a "pause (0.001)" or a similarly small value in the loop you suspect to be the infinite one. Whenever MATLAB passes this instruction you will be able to interact with MATLAB for a (very) short time, e.g. go to the main window and press CTRL-C with MATLAB being able to respond to your command.
Here is what I am trying to accomplish:
To Copy, press and release Caps Lock ONCE
To Paste, press and release Caps Lock TWICE, quickly
To Cut, press Ctrl+Caps Lock
The reason I want to do this is often times i find my self looking down to press the correct X/C/V key, since they're all next to each other (atleast on a QWERTY keyboard).
How can I do this on a standard keyboard (using Windows), so that it applies to the entire system and is transparent to all applications, including to Windows Explorer? If not possible with a standard keyboard, can any of the "programmable numeric keypads" do this you think?
In the above, by "transparent" I mean "the application should never know that this keystroke was translated. It only gets the regular Ctrl+X/C/V code, so it behaves without any problems".
Ps. Not sure of all the tags that are appropriate for this question, so feel free to add more tags.
SOLVED. UPDATE:
Thank you to #Jonno_FTW for introducing me to AutoHotKey.
I managed all three requirements by adding the following AHK script in the default AutoHotKey.ahk file in My Documents folder:
Ctrl & CapsLock::
Send ^x
Return
CapsLock::
If (A_PriorHotKey = A_ThisHotKey and A_TimeSincePriorHotkey < 1000)
Send ^v
Else
Send ^c
Return
That was easy!
NOT COMPLETELY SOLVED. UPDATE:
The above works in Notepad, but NOT in Explorer (copying files for example) or MS Office (even text copying does not work). So, I need to dig around a bit more into AutoHotKey or other solutions. Will post a solution here when I find one.
In the meantime, if someone can make AutoHotKey work for everything I need, please reply!
ALL SOLVED. UPDATE:
All I had to do was to change the capital "C"/X/Z to lowercase "c"/x/z. So Send ^C became Send ^c. It now works in ALL programs inlcuding Windows Explorer! Fixed code above to reflect this change.
I believe the program you are looking for is AutoHotkey.
You need a Global Keyboard Hook.
Very nice! Been looking for something like this for a while.
My script is slightly different, making use of shift or control combinations for cut/copy, then CapsLock on its own is always paste.
Ctrl & CapsLock::
Send ^x
Return
Shift & CapsLock::
Send ^c
Return
CapsLock::
Send ^v
Return
If you wanted to retain the option of retaining the Caps Lock function, I presume you could always remap e.g. Alt-CapsLock for this. I couldn't get it to toggle correctly when I tried it though.