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How to send a "Cmd-C" keystroke to the active application in objective-c, or tell the application to do a copy operation?

Answer 1

+5 A:

See GCPostKeyboardEvent.

Darren 2009-10-01 19:27:06

Thanks for the fast reply, but the reference page for GCPostKeyboardEvent says this method is deprecated in 10.6... I'm working on a commercial product and I need a future-proof solution. The discussion says CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent would be a good replacement candidate, but it's only supported from 10.4 and up... is there another way to do this?

Form 2009-10-01 19:37:13

@Form I think the way to handle that is conditional compilation. Use CGPostKeyboardEvent for < 10.3 and CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent for >= 10.4

Amuck 2009-10-01 19:38:43

Apple dropping runtime support for the 10.6 SDK is the least of your concerns. Especially you're trying to target pre-10.4, which I suppose would be 10.3.9 since that's the earliest Universal SDK.

Darren 2009-10-01 22:05:04

Why would the deprecation in 10.6 be the least of my concerns? (please elaborate if you don't mind)"10.3.9 since that's the earliest Universal SDK" >> didn't know that... does that mean the earliest version of Mac OS X I can build a single app bundle for is 10.3.9? What about an older version?

Form 2009-10-02 04:53:08

There's a difference between SDK support and runtime support. Deprecated means that it may be dropped in some future SDK, say 10.8. It does not (necessarily) mean that they will drop runtime support for that deprecated function. Once an API is released publicly Apple essentially agrees to support it forever, or at least a very long time (decades). Furthermore, if you target an old SDK, like 10.4 or even 10.3, you will invariably be using many APIs that have since been deprecated in 10.5 and 10.6.

Darren 2009-10-02 17:41:28

In Snow Leopard, the oldest SDK you can target is 10.4. If you have a older version of XCode you can target 10.3.9. Beyond that you would be building a PPC-only application.

Darren 2009-10-02 17:48:19

Ok thanks for the clarification! I guess I'll try CGPostKeyboardEvent then!

Form 2009-10-02 20:21:40

Oh, and how would I send a key combination (i.e: Cmd-C) using this method?

Form 2009-10-02 20:23:49

Answer 2

+2 A:

If you can enable System Events (access for assistive devices) on the computer, you can send this script with an NSAppleEvent [EDIT: actually NSAppleScript] initWithSource:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using command down

I don't really have any idea when System Events was introduced, though.

Rob 2009-10-01 20:23:51

This seems like a good solution although I think you meant NSAppleScript and not NSAppleEvent. I tried to do that but while the script works in the Script Editor, it does not in my application... I'm hearing the "no text is selected, you can't copy" beep when the script is run in my code. Safari has the focus when this happens, so I'm pretty much clueless about what the problem is...

Form 2009-10-02 20:19:53

You're right about the NSAppleScript. Sorry about that. The beep means that System Events is not enabled. It has to be enabled in System Preferences->Universal Access->Enable Access for Assistive Devices.

Rob 2009-10-02 21:38:36

You might also be interested in this, then: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060203225241914

Rob 2009-10-02 21:41:45

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How to send a "Cmd-C" keystroke to the active application in objective-c, or tell the application to do a copy operation?

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