How to paste text from one app to another using Cocoa? - cocoa

I have read about NSPasteBoard in the Apple documentation, and how it allows for applications to write into the PasteBoard and allow other applications to read that text and use it.
Could someone tell me how to paste text from am application (that sits in the status bar) into a NSTextField that is inside a different application.
What I am trying to do is something similar what Snippet and SnippetsApp do.
If I am completely stupid and missed the obvious in Apple Docs, could you please point me to the right path :)
Thanks!

Could someone tell me how to paste text from am application (that sits in the status bar) into a NSTextField that is inside a different application.
Pasting is what happens in the receiving application. Writing to a pasteboard is copying.
Furthermore, you can't assume that the user will want to paste into an NSTextField. It may be an NSTextView, or a textarea in a WebView, or a Carbon EditText or MLTE control, or some other text editor such as a Qt or wxWidgets text editor. They may even be using an app with a list view that lets them paste text directly into it.
So, there's no programmatic way to directly tell an application “here's some text — paste it, please”. You have to copy it to the general pasteboard and then forge an event that should generally cause the frontmost app to paste. Charlie's suggestion of ⌘V is one way, albeit tricky; the Dvorak layout puts V on another key, while the “Dvorak QWERTY ⌘” layout puts V-with-⌘ (as opposed to V-without-⌘) on the same key as QWERTY's V.
To forge that ⌘V event, look into CGEventTap. You'll need to use the CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent function to create the event itself, and since that function takes a key code, you'll need to look up the proper key code for the V part of the ⌘V combination, which will require going through Text Input Source Services or Keyboard Layout Services, depending on the layout.
You might at this point think of using Accessibility to find the Paste menu item in the Edit menu and send it an AXPress message, but “Paste” and “Edit” are only English's words for those concepts; if you did this, your app would not work in any other language. You could go by order (third menu, sixth menu item), but then your app would not work in applications without a File menu, or without a Redo menu item, or with two Undo menu items (Photoshop). Forging a ⌘V event really is the way to go.

Here's some working code to post the ⌘+key event (assuming a known keycode):
// some common keycodes
#define KEY_CODE_x ((CGKeyCode)7)
#define KEY_CODE_c ((CGKeyCode)8)
#define KEY_CODE_v ((CGKeyCode)9)
void DCPostCommandAndKey(CGKeyCode key)
{
CGEventSourceRef source = CGEventSourceCreate(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState);
CGEventRef keyDown = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(source, key, TRUE);
CGEventSetFlags(keyDown, kCGEventFlagMaskCommand);
CGEventRef keyUp = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(source, key, FALSE);
CGEventPost(kCGAnnotatedSessionEventTap, keyDown);
CGEventPost(kCGAnnotatedSessionEventTap, keyUp);
CFRelease(keyUp);
CFRelease(keyDown);
CFRelease(source);
}

Generally the only way is to write it to the NSPasteboard and then switch to another app and use some Carbon functions to press "Command-V"...

Related

Keyboard Extension - Find out if user did Copy/Cut/Select

In Keyboard Extension, in UIInputViewController, I can get notified through textDidChange(textInput: UITextInput) of any change, and use self.textDocumentProxy.documentContextBefore/AfterInput to get current text.
Problem arise when user 'select text'. The 'before' and 'after' "sees" only the part before and after selection.
Is there any way to know if user touched any of the Copy-Cut-Select in a textField (given - we don't have access to that field from Keyboard Extension)?
Something like:
if(self.textDocumentProxy.someProperty == UIDocumentProxyTextCut)
Or any other way to know which of the UITextField action (Copy/Cut/Select) did the user took?
I think we can not find out if user touched on Copy/Cut/Paste menu
Because a custom keyboard can draw only within the primary view of its
UIInputViewController object, it cannot select text. Text selection is
under the control of the app that is using the keyboard. If that app
provides an editing menu interface (such as for Cut, Copy, and Paste),
the keyboard has no access to it. A custom keyboard cannot offer
inline autocorrection controls near the insertion point.
Source: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Keyboard.html
P/s:
I saw self.textDocumentProxy.documentContextAfterInput is always NIL. Who know why?
How can we know where the cursor is to provide suggestion for user?

Applescript and Microsoft Word

I'm working on a applescript to update the content of a document in Microsoft Word. The updating process is quite long (might take more than 5s). So I want to prevent users to change anything during the updating. Do you know whether Microsoft or Applescript a function like that?
In Windows, I can just display a User Form (which is a dialog telling that "we are updating... ") and close that form when it's done. However, I don't know whether I can do the same in Mac (with Applescript alone).
When you say "applescript", I don't know if you mean "plain" applescript or the AppleScriptObjC version. If you mean the latter, then I know ways to do it.
One way I've used during slow processes is to put an overlay view over the whole content view of the window. I make it translucent white to partially obscure the window, and put some kind of message (and maybe a progress indicator) on it. You can just use an NSBox (of the custom type) in IB to make this, and then make a subclass of NSBox to color the view and override mouseDown:. MouseDown:, doesn't need to have any code in it, just by overriding it, you capture any key and mouse events so they don't accumulate on the event queue, and get used by the view below after your overlay goes away. Here's code I've used:
script Overlay
property parent : class "NSBox"
on awakeFromNib()
set overlayColor to current application's NSColor's colorWithCalibratedWhite_alpha_(1,.8)
setFillColor_(overlayColor)
end
on mouseDown_(theEvent)
--log "mouseDown"
end
end script
I have this view as the top most view in the view hierarchy, and set its hidden property to true until I want to show it.

Win32 custom message box

I want to make a custom message box. What I want to customize is the button's text.
MessageBoxW(
NULL,
L"Target folder already exists. Do you want to overwrite the folder?",
L"No title",
MB_YESNOCANCEL | MB_ICONQUESTION
);
I'd like to just change the buttons text to Overwrite, Skip, Cancel.
What's the most simple way?
I have to make this as having same look and feel with Windows default messagebox.
As said by others, a typical way is to create a dialog resource and have a completely independent dialog, which GUI you need to design in the way that it looks like standard dialog (to meet your request for feel and look). If you want to accept text messages, you might probably need to add code which resizes the window appropriately.
Still, there is another option for those who feel like diving into advanced things. While MessageBox API does not offer much for fint tuning, you still have SetWindowsHookEx in your hands. Having registgered the hook, you can intercept standard MessageBox window procedure and subclass it in the way you like.
Typical things include:
changing button text
adding more controls
adding timed automatic close
Hooking standard window can do all of those.
UPD. Hey, I realized I have some code with SetWindowsHookEx to share: http://alax.info/blog/127
You could create an own dialog. Or you could use a window hook as described in this article.
An archived version of the article can be found on web.archive.com.
Make a dialog resource (with a GUI editor, or by hand) and call DialogBox on it. There's no way to alter MessageBox behaviour, other than what's supported by its arguments.
That said, your message box can very well use stock Yes/No options.
The task dialog functionality introduced in Vista does exactly what you want and follows the prevailing system theme. However, if you have to support XP, then this will be of little comfort to you.
I know this question is old, but I just stumbled upon it now.
I would like to expand the other answers in regards to using a TaskDialog instead of a MessageBox. Here's a concise example of using a TaskDialog to do precisely what was asked; change the button's texts:
const TASKDIALOG_BUTTON buttons[] = { {IDYES, L"Overwrite"}, {IDNO, L"Skip"}, {IDCANCEL, L"Cancel"} };
TASKDIALOGCONFIG taskDialogConfig = {
.cbSize = sizeof(TASKDIALOGCONFIG),
.pszMainIcon = TD_WARNING_ICON, // TaskDialog does not support a question icon; see below
.pButtons = buttons,
.cButtons = ARRAYSIZE(buttons),
.pszWindowTitle = L"No title",
.pszContent = L"Target folder already exists. Do you want to overwrite the folder?"
};
TaskDialogIndirect(&taskDialogConfig, NULL, NULL, NULL);
Some noteworthy things:
You need to use TaskDialogIndirect, not the basic TaskDialog function
when not specifying a parent window, the icon specified in pszMainIcon is displayed in the title bar as well
There is no equivalent to the MessageBox's MB_ICONQUESTION, quoting a quote from this forumpost: Don't use the question mark icon to ask questions. Again, use the question mark icon only for Help entry points. There is no need to ask questions using the question mark icon anyway—it's sufficient to present a main instruction as a question.
checking which button was selected would have to be done by passing a pointer to an int as the second argument of TaskDialogIndirect and checking its value on return (the documentation should be pretty clear)
Here is a small open source library that allows you to customize Message Boxes. Developed by Hans Ditrich.
I have successfully used it in another POC that allows embedding a custom icon in such MessageBox that can be called even from a Console application.
I should also point to the Task Dialog. Here is an example of using it:
int nButtonPressed = 0;
TaskDialog(NULL, hInst,
MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDS_APPLICATION_TITLE),
MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDS_DOSOMETHING),
MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDS_SOMECONTENT),
TDCBF_OK_BUTTON | TDCBF_CANCEL_BUTTON,
TD_WARNING_ICON,
&nButtonPressed);
if (IDOK == nButtonPressed)
{
// OK button pressed
}
else if (IDCANCEL == nButtonPressed)
{
// Cancel pressed
}

Get Context Menu text of specific TaskBar button

I've got some code that grabs the TaskBar buttons and their text from the windows TaskBar using User32.SendMessage with the TB_GETBUTTON message to retrieve a TBBUTTON structure (Win32 API via C# P/Invokes). But I'm trying to figure out how to then, once I have the handle to the button, grab the associated context menu text. There is some status information on there for a specific application that I would like to retrieve. The button text gets me some of it, but I need to the context menu text to complete it.
Any ideas?
This is not completely clear... Context menus don't have text, as such - they have menu items, each one of which will have text. By "context menu text", do you mean the text of the menu items in the taskbar button's popup/context menu? For example, "Restore", "Minimize" etc in the screenshot below?
If so, I suspect you're going about this the wrong way:
This menu doesn't belong to the button, but is the system menu of the window represented by the taskbar button. If the button has a context menu, this is probably for a grouped collection of windows, not one specific window (or even windows for one process.)
Making judgements based on the context menu of a window sounds like a dodgy approach to me, especially based on text since that will change depending on where in the world your user is located. Applications can also change the contents of this menu so there's no guarantee it will contain something you expect to be there. It would be better to check the window style, if it's minimized, etc, to find out the information that also affects the contents of the menu.
I'm going to answer this based on what your needs seem to be from the question, not what you've directly asked, since (a) it's not possible as asked and (b) I think you're trying to do something else. (As a general guideline, in a question it's good to state why you're trying to do something - and even maybe ask about that, ie 'how do I achieve X' - in case there's a better method than the one you're using. Here, X is probably 'find out information about this window' not 'get the text of the context menu', because that's probably only one possible method to get to X.) Also I think extracting data from the internals of a third-party application like Explorer (the taskbar is an Explorer window) is fragile and prone to break in future versions of Windows.
The system menu or window information (whichever one) belongs to application windows. Unless taskbar buttons are grouped (and then it's the subitems) one taskbar button corresponds to one specific window in the system. So what you want to do is find these windows. You do this by:
Using the EnumWindows function
Then for each window that is passed to the callback, checking the extended window style using GetWindowLong with GWL_EXSTYLE to see if the WS_EX_APPWINDOW bit is set
In addition, sometimes other windows are shown: these heuristics should help.
Each one of these windows is a window that should appear on the taskbar, Alt-Tab dialog, etc.
You say you're getting the text of the taskbar button - this is probably the window caption of the window, and GetWindowText is the canonical (read: probably a lot more reliable) way to get the caption of a window belonging to another process.
If you really want the popup menu, then:
Use GetSystemMenu to retrieve the handle for the system menu for the window. Applications can customise this, so if your app is doing this (and that's why you want the popup menu) ensure you pass false to the bRevert parameter
You can then get the number of menu items using GetMenuItemCount and for each one call GetMenuItemInfo to get info about each menu item. Pass true to the fByPosition parameter to indicate you're accessing the menus by position (since you know the count, you're getting item 0, 1, 2... count-1).
This fills a MENUITEMINFO structure, which (I think, I haven't ever had to code this so I haven't tested) will tell you the text associated with an item via the dwTypeData field "if the MIIM_STRING flag is set in the fMask member".
If you really want information about the window status, you can get this information using methods like IsIconic to see if it's minimized, GetWindowLong again to get other information, etc. I'd suggest you ask another SO question about how to get whatever specific information about a window for details.
Hope that helps!

Get currently selected item in Mac UI

I want to get the currently selected item (text, image, etc) and display in my Cocoa app's window when a keyboard shortcut is hit. Droplr has functionality like this, for example. How do I go about doing this?
For example, I want it to return "(text, image, etc)" as text when that text selected on the screen like this: http://drp.ly/JAdv
The easiest way is to write a service and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Services are designed to do exactly this: operate on the selected text, graphics, etc. (or insert information at the selection).
NSResponder * activeControl = [currentWindow firstResponder];

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