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EventGhost-TaskMonitorPlus

This program is not very useful on its own. It's a plugin for EventGhost. EventGhost is an automation tool for MS Windows which listens for events -- whether user-triggered (like the press of a hotkey) or system events (such as the screensaver activating) -- and runs actions you specify. (It's like Tasker for Android, or Cuttlefish for Ubuntu.)

Description

TaskMonitorPlus is a fork/expansion of the Task Monitor (aka simply Task) plugin for EventGhost. The original Task Monitor plugin generates events when a window opens, closes, flashes, or gains or loses focus. But the event contains nothing but the name of the executable which created the window.

TaskMonitorPlus still produces these events (as well as a new event for when a window's title changes), but now they come with a payload. The eg.event.payload produced by an event is an object (named WindowInfo, if you're curious) with the following attributes and methods:

  • title: the title of the window
  • window_class: the internal class name for the window
  • hwnd: the internal ID for the window
  • pid: the process ID for thet executable owning the window
  • name: the executable name of the process owning the window (same as in the event itself)
  • GetParent(): returns a new object representing the parent of this window
  • Focus(): directs focus to the window
  • HasFocus(): returns True if the window has focus
  • IsAlive(): returns True if the window is still open
  • IsActive(): returns True if this window is the currently active one
  • Animate(): coming soon
  • SendKeystrokes(): just like the Send Keys action in EventGhost
  • Flash(): make the window flash
  • BringToTop(): raise the window
  • IsVisible(): returns True if the window isn't hidden
  • EnableKeyboardMouse(): enable (or disable) mouse and keyboard input for the window
  • IsKeyboardMouseEnabled(): returns True if so
  • Restore(): restores the window to its previous state
  • Minimize(): minimize (or un-minimize) the window
  • Maximize(): maximize the window
  • SetPosition(): set the window's position
  • SetSize(): set the window's size
  • SetRect(): set the window's position and size
  • GetRect() and GetRectTuple(): return window's position and size
  • GetSize() and GetSizeTuple(): return window's size
  • GetPosition() and GetPositionTuple(): return window's position
  • Show(): show (or hide) the window
  • Hide(): hide the window
  • Destroy(): destroy the window
  • Close(): close the window
  • SendMessage() and PostMessage(): low-level messaging to window

The methods are documented in the source code in detail. This documentation should appear in your IDE and in PyCharm (the Python shell that EventGhost includes under the Help menu).

The window title can change over the window's lifetime. The title attribute tries to fetch the most recent window title whenever it's accessed, but if it can't (like if the window has been closed and no longer exists) it returns the last known title.

Usage

You should remove the Task Monitor plugin (which ships with EventGhost) from your Autostart list, if it's there, before installing Task Monitor Plus. Don't just disable Task Monitor, because it may still interfere with Task Monitor Plus as long as it's installed.

You can install this plugin and activate it like any other. If you've used the standard Task Monitor plugin, the behaviour is identical, except that the events produced start with TaskMonitorPlus. instead of Task..

In case you aren't familiar with the standard Task Monitor plugin, here's how you can use it: at the bottom of the EventGhost window, uncheck the checkbox that says "Log only assigned and activated events", then open or switch to a window which you'd like to take action on. You'll see an entry appear in the log that looks something like this:

TaskMonitorPlus.NewWindow.notepad <title=u'Untitled - Notepad', window_class=u'Notepad',...>

You can drag this entry from the log into any macro you've created, to cause the actions in that macro to be played back the next time that action takes place.

You can access the payload object from follow-on actions via the eg.event.payload object. For a simple example, to flash an on-screen display of the current window's title when Notepad opens, you could add the the EventGhost → Show OSD action to a macro, and enter something like "New window opened: {eg.event.payload.title}" in the "Text to display" field.

For more information on using EventGhost, consult the EventGhost website, wiki, and forums.

Downloads and Support

Official releases of this plugin are being made available at this thread on the EventGhost forums. You can also provide feedback and request support there.

I also accept issues and pull requests from the official GitHub repo for this project, Boolean263/EventGhost-TaskMonitorPlus. However, remember that this is not originally my work (although admittedly we've changed it a fair bit these days) . If you experience problems with Task Monitor Plus, please check if the problem also happens when you use the original Task Monitor plugin.

Author

Boolean263 (aka David Perry) and kgschlosser, based on work by Bitmonster and blackwind

History

The original, canonical Task Monitor ships with EventGhost. This version is based on version 1.0.4 of that plugin (which was copied from the 0.5.0-rc4 release of EventGhost) and modified, based on ideas I had in (and feedback I received on) my EventGhost-WindowWatcher plugin.

Changelog

v0.0.5 - 2017-09-09

  • Fix reported EventGhost freeze when getting the title of EventGhost windows (unfortunately, this means that eg.event.payload.title is no longer meaningful for windows created by EventGhost itself)

v0.0.4 - 2017-09-08

  • Improve caching of window title and class (should now behave better for windows that legitimately have an empty string for either)
  • Raise a WindowInfo.DeadWindow exception when attempting to modify windows that no longer exist (many query functions, such as IsActive(), don't raise this and simply return False; GetRect() and the like still raise an exception)
  • Raise a WindowInfo.NoParent exception (instead of the old ValueError) when calling GetParent() on a window with no parent

v0.0.3 - 2017-09-07

  • Removed TaskHook.dll since it's not actually needed (thanks kgschlosser for the find)
  • Added the TitleChanged event after discovering the HSHELL_REDRAW event type (the event payload contains the window's new title)
  • Improved plugin documentation that shows within EventGhost
  • Add new WindowInfo methods (thanks kgschlosser)

v0.0.2 - 2017-09-02

  • Bugfix: this plugin was breaking the event log if it tried to report a window that had non-ASCII characters in its title. I don't know if this is a bug in EventGhost itself or what, but I fixed it by using repr() to return the window title.

v0.0.1 - 2017-08-29

  • Initial release of the Plus version of this plugin