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];
Related
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?
I'm writing a Silverlight+XNA game and when the user has something in their clipboard they can see less of the screen. I'd really like to be able to not show this clipbaord but I can't see any way (though it does seem to go away after some amount of time)
I've tried an empty string and Clipboard.SetText(null) but that throws an exception.
Unfortunately, there is no way to either clear the clipboard from code or influence the display of the SIP beyond setting an InputScope.
The best you can do for now is to update your design to allow for the amount of space which the SIP may use. :(
While more complicated, you could create your own text input keys as buttons, and instead of using a textbox, use buttons templated to look like textblocks, with background as you show above, and all... When the user taps the "button" that is a "textblock", you set a flag that says which textblock the keypad buttons send their numbers to.
Or, if the only spot you are sending inputs to (as it appears now that I look at your UI again), there is no need for the button template as the input space, or the flag. Just create buttons for user to tap for input, and send that input to the textblock that appears to be where your answer is. You could make the buttons whatever size you want, that way, as well, so you control how much of the screen is visible. Another thing you could do is make the buttons semi-transparent, so you could have even more background image showing.
Another thought - send the buttons all to the same event handler (except the backspace button), and have the code for that event handler look like this:
{
Button btn = sender as Button;
textblock.Text += btn.Content;
}
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!
In the bing maps app on windows phone, when I click the search button I get a search box sliding in from the top of the screen, and the keyboard sliding in from the bottom. I want to achieve the same behaviour in my own windows phone app (based around a bing map control).
I will want a few drop-in boxes, such as for setting up a filter (which will need a few check boxes and text entry), and adding an item (which will require a text entry for the name, and ideally still allow the map in the main panel to be panned to fine-tune the location of the item).
I'm pretty sure the keyboard comes up automatically when a textbox gets focus, but I'm not sure what might be the best approach for dropping in the search box. It looks like it would need something with storyboards/animations/projections, but I haven't found a clear standard approach so far, and I want to make sure I do it the right way from the start (as I don't really have time to do it twice).
Is there a standard/best practice way to achieve the effect?
Yes, and you don't need a single line of code. You can express the whole animation using XAML. Get a text on Silverlight and read the chapters on animation with particular reference to storyboards and Easing.
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"...