How do I take out the focus or minimize a window with Python?

Question

I need to get focus to a specified window, and the only way I'm seeing on my head, is minimizing all windows on front of it until I get the right one...

How can I do it?

Windows 7, and no specific toolkit....

Every type of window, for example, firefox and console command

Answer 1

I'm assuming from the question, that you want to write a generic to that can work with any window from any application.

You might want to try the Python Win32 GUI Automation library. I haven't used it but sounds like it might be what you are looking for. If that doesn't work, your best option might be forgo python and use a tool like AutoIt that provides built in support for window manipulation.

If neither of those solutions work you will probable have to directly invoke windows api. I do not know if the win32api package wraps the necessary functionality, otherwise you will have write a python module in c/c++.

If this kind of functionality is available in the .net api, you could use IronPython.

Answer 2

You'll need to enumerate through the windows and match the title of the window to get the one you want. The code below searches for a window with "firefox" in the title and sets the focus:

import win32gui

toplist = []
winlist = []
def enum_callback(hwnd, results):
    winlist.append((hwnd, win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd)))

win32gui.EnumWindows(enum_callback, toplist)
firefox = [(hwnd, title) for hwnd, title in winlist if 'firefox' in title.lower()]
# just grab the first window that matches
firefox = firefox[0]
# use the window handle to set focus
win32gui.SetForegroundWindow(firefox[0])

To minimize the window, the following line:

import win32con
win32gui.ShowWindow(firefox[0], win32con.SW_MINIMIZE)

Answer 3

You can use pywinauto

pywinauto is a set of open-source (LGPL) modules for using Python as a GUI automation 'driver' for Windows NT based Operating Systems (NT/W2K/XP).

At it's simplest it allows you to send mouse and keyboard actions to windows dialogs and controls.

from its web page:

> from pywinauto import application
> app = application.Application.start("notepad.exe")
> app.notepad.TypeKeys("%FX")
> app.Notepad.MenuSelect("File->SaveAs")
> app.SaveAs.ComboBox5.Select("UTF-8")
> app.SaveAs.edit1.SetText("Example-utf8.txt")
> app.SaveAs.Save.Click()