I'd like to replace the bitmap on the logon screen of Windows 7 64-bit with one that is on disk. I have a program that periodically switches the background image of my desktop, and it has a configuration to run a program after it has changed it, which I thought I could use to also copy the same bitmap to the logon screen.
Does anyone know how to do that, or even if it is possible? If someone knows a handy command line utility to do it, that would of course be nice (but then I suspect this question should be migrated to superuser.com first), but if someone has some API commands that would help, that would be more than enough.
I found an article which detailed a dll and some resources I would have to replace. That sounds a bit too hackish for this.
I typed "change background image logon screen windows 7" into a search engine and the first link was: this which seems to show how to do it. Now you just need to figure out how to write a program to automate the steps.
Related
I'm writing an application for Windows 10 to display and update text at specific locations in a Windows console window. The program is launched by a command in the console window. Upon launch, it erases the window's previous contents, then displays its output, updating as it goes, until completion. Upon exit, it should leave the displayed output in place, and a new command prompt should appear below. Launch, display, and subsequent command prompt all occur in the same console window. (Old school, I know, but that's the requirement.) The program is written in C and uses calls to the PDcurses library to control cursor placement and to output display text to the screen. The application is built with GCC/MinGW on a Windows 10 platform.
Everything works until the application exits, but then the display output disappears and the previous window contents (from before the app was launched) reappear. From what I can tell, this seems to be the default behavior for curses, possibly due to the way it handles screen buffering.
I'm looking for ways to override this behavior, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Can I direct PDcurses to write to the standard screen buffer rather than the alternate screen buffer (if that's what's going on)? If so, how? Should I copy the contents of the screen buffer before I call endwin(), then copy those contents back to the screen buffer afterward? Again, how? I'm sure this problem has already been solved, probably many times, but I haven't found any solutions that seem to apply to a C executable running in a Windows console, and I have only limited experience with PDcurses and the Windows API library. Any help would be appreciated.
The official way to do it is to set an environment variable: set PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN=0. You can combine this with set PDC_PRESERVE_SCREEN=Y to prevent PDCurses from clearing the screen at startup.
I would like to be able to stop windows from being dragged past the border of the screen. For example, open a window that is not maximized, click the top bar with the mouse and drag the window wherever you want. Now drag the window to the left/right/top/bottom of your screen and notice that part of the window goes off screen. I would like the window to bump up against the edge of the screen and go no further.
In the same way the cursor can't go over the edge on the left side, I would like to make a barrier so windows can't move over it either.
The main reason for doing this is because I am making a batch program in which I need it to not go off screen. This is annoying and I was hoping that someone here could be of some help.
Sorry if this is an obvious question, I tried a few searches but had no idea what terms to look up.
Thanks for any help in advance!
Sorry for the late response (I was researching this), but here is the answer:
There is no current way to do this easily. I'm sure you can edit windows src code and add that property, but the language it is made in is not in batch and it would be EXTREMELY hard to edit these files :(
Also, this would affect all windows, not only that specific program, meaning no easy shortcut for split screen. So no, you cannot do this.
On Windows 10 you can simply move a window near the edge of the screen and it will auto-fit on screen. You can also use shortcuts to do this. [Windows key] + [arrow left] or [arrow right]
you were able to change a setting in windows 7 to prevent this. I know that this is a feature if you are using multiple monitors but if using only one monitor there should be a way to change a setting. thank you Microsoft once again for making our lives complicated. the more you guy release a new windows the harder it is to use.
Finally i found real solution for this.
I was searching a real solution for my application.
There are many tricks but using reg we need to restart computer.
You can disable it from powershell. You need to call this file from your code.
Here is link.
Check download file at bottom called "DisableAeroSnap.ps1"
https://michlstechblog.info/blog/windows-disable-aerosnap-automatically-window-arranging-and-resizing-while-dragging/#more-951
Ok, so I'm trying to make my setup super simple by creating a script that I can run in the morning that will launch all the applications that I use in the day and lay them out across my 'spaces' how I like them.
This was going ok and I was easily able to have a bash script launch the apps and then call to an AppleScript to move and resize their windows.
However, I like to use the new El Capitan feature and have some of my spaces as 'split view' spaces. E.g. Full screen Xcode/Terminal split. I can't seem to find a way to control this via a script.
Tl;dr Does anyone know how to get a bash script/AppleScript to put two applications into 'split view' on OS X El Capitan?
Looks like that first bit about launching and full-screening apps can be done with a fairly simple script, though it requires enabling Accessibility permissions first. It, however, won't do the split-screen bit.
I kept looking though and Better Touch Tool (pay what you want, $4.49 minimum) seems to get the closest of anything I could find, allowing you to trigger Full Screen mode and bring up the split screen Expose selector in the same action. It seems to be doing this by emulating a long mouse down on the full screen window control button (the green one in the top left). What you get is this:
I've been playing around with this and it seems there might be a (so far seemingly very un-intgelligeble, though reliable) way to control the order of full screen apps and trigger an app into split screen mode in a situation where that previously full-screened app is the only option available for splitting the screen.
For example, given the following, accomplished by launching iA Writer into full screen (space 2) via ⌘+^+F:
Focusing Safari and using Better Touch Tool to trigger split screen mode results in:
... Only one split screen app, even though there's several apps still running.
From this position you could use the "move to position" action in BTT and trigger a click on the only available app— I would think this could theoretically accomplish what you want, although it's convoluted and a bit suspect.
All that being said, it seems like the only way to get two apps launched into split screen mode without touching the mouse, since this could all be a BTT workflow you trigger from an Automator script. Digging further, you might be able to learn how BTT accomplishes their actions and write a program that does this for you, but we're already way beyond bash or simple cli scripting.
I personally just use Spectacle and tmux to zoom my windows around, though I admit, automated split screen would be somewhere close to live changing.
I'm building an app that needs to be able to take intermittent screen captures of a target window while running in the background. That is, it needs to be able to screenshot a specific window without user interaction.
Say for example I have Photoshop open, I'd like to capture a screenshot of my open Photoshop document every few minutes and save the capture to a file, essentially building a visual history of how the document has changed over time.
Currently I'm searching for a Unix/Mac solution but Window's suggestions are warmly welcomed.
Screencapture & Scrot both require mouse interaction to target a window & from what I've researched Imagemagick requires xwd to launch to get the id of the target window.
I'm looking for a lightweight solution (that I can bundle with my software) or ideally a solution already built into the OS to accomplish this.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
xwd utility can dump particular X11 window content. It accepts window ID to dump as an argument and can be used in non-interactive mode.
To capture the whole X-desktop on any unix/linux non-interactively you can call:
xwd -root > file
To display the dump:
xwud -in file
i am using the createdesktop api to create a desktop and i would like to take a screenshot or send input mouse/keyboard without dispalying the desktop to the user.any ideeas on how to implement this???
The short answer that I've found is that you can't. You can't take a screenshot of an inactive desktop because there are no paint calls because there are no visible windows to redraw.
You can do a SwitchDesktop() call, screen shot, then SwitchDesktop() back. The user won't notice it, but you likely won't get much in the screen shot because in this short time the windows haven't had time to redraw.
Another thing is, you have to make a new thread to call SetThreadDesktop(). If you use your main thread to do so, it will fail when using a GUI application. SetThreadDesktop() fails when you have a window in the current desktop.
SysInternals has an application to manage multiple desktops (like the linux desktop switch). When your about to pick a desktop to switch to it will show you a thumbnail of the desktop. This thumbnail is not live, it is captured by the last known full redraw when the user is in that desktop. In short, if SysInternals can't do a live screenshot I doubt any of us will.
This is of course based on my own research of this exact feature. If someone has actually gotten it to work I'd love to know so I can't use it too!
Edit: This won't work for invisible desktops, I've looked to my old code, and I see that I needed that for catching screenshot of active desktop (which was not 'WinSta0\Default'), to get handle of active user desktop I've used OpenInputDesktop.
+1 ThievingSix you are right.
Sorry everyone for my misunderstanding.
You need to use SetThreadDesktop (if you are creating desktop by CreateDestkop, then you have handle for it which you pass to SetThreadDesktop). After switching desktop for thread, you can catch screenshot. Good idea would be revert to previous desktop for thread (to not 'break' other/future code).
var
lOldDesktop: HDESK;
begin
lOldDesktop:= GetThreadDesktop(GetCurrentThreadId);
try
if not SetThreadDesktop(ADesktop) then // pass handle to your desktop, or dekstop handle obtained from OpenInputDesktop
{error handle, like RaiseLastOSError or Exit(False)};
// your screenshot/input/mouse code here
finally
if lOldDesktop<> 0 then // GetThreadDesktop can fail (I don't know condition when this GetThreadDesktop(GetCurrentThreadId) could fail)
SetThreadDesktop(lOldDesktop); // revert thread to previous desktop
end;
end;
This code should run in non-main thread, as ThievingSix pointed because SetThreadDesktop can fail in that case. Safe way is spawn thread to make screenshot.
PS. I'm not sure if this will work with "send input mouse/keyboard" (it should), but for screenshot works.
Edit:
More on sessions, window stations, desktops here http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/07/24/sessions-desktops-and-windows-stations.aspx
Desktop tool (SysInternals) - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881