I have a swing Java application (A) that launches another application (B) using Runtime.getRuntime().exec() when a certain button is pressed.
Is it possible to set a certain Key Hook so that when the application (B) is open and active, it changes the buttons (for example, when you press "Q", in fact, the "H" button is pressed, and so on). And a similar situation for the mouse (for example, if "Mouse Mid" or "Mouse Wheel" is pressed, in fact another button is pressed, for example "T").
Ideally, it should work for all operating systems if possible, but Windows primarily.
Please tell me if it is possible to implement this at all, I will be glad to any advice or examples.
As you want to hook with operating system's low level events. It could require JNI implementation that could be complex and will require OS libraries. There is one Maven library available at Github https://github.com/kristian/system-hook
It contains required libs as mentioned in Readme.md file. I haven't tried this. Hopefully it should work.
Related
How can I disable OS-level keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right, etc.) on a [Ubuntu] Linux machine? I'm developing a full-screen Java Swing app and don't want the user to be able to task switch away from the program arbitrarily. It's not enough to toggle the "always on top" flag; users mustn't be allowed to switch workspaces, migrate focus or any other such things. The machine must function normally before and after the application is executed. Google says that this will require JNI or JNA but I'm looking for a bit more hand-holding.
There's no point in trying to do this in your application because any of these changes are going to need to be handled by X11 and/or the window manager since those are what respond to the commands. Assuming that you have control of the platform, choose a window manager which supports a kiosk mode. Then use the window manager's settings to start your application and enter kiosk mode.
Options for window managers which can do this include KDE or twm-kiosk.
(And if you don't have control of the platform, you're not likely to be able to have your application intercept things like ctrl-alt-backspace anyway.)
Edit:
In response to a scaled-down version of the question in which he's willing to let things like ctl-alt-backspace go and just wants most of the keys including alt-tab or other similar application switching key combinations, the following should work:
You should be able to do this using XLib's XGrabKeyboard method through JNI. This Java/XLib JNI keypress capture tutorial should be a good starting point. However, it uses XGrabKey which just passively listens for keys and does not prevent other applications from receiving them. You'll instead want to use XGrabKeyboard which actively snags all of the normal keyboard events (which, if the premise of this StackOverflow question is correct, includes the task switching keys).
Note that as a side-effect, key capture in Swing will also probably stop working because your Swing windows are going to be separate from the window you create in C. As such, you will probably have to use your JNI interface to get key presses to your program when needed. (Although I would definitely advise testing it first before writing the code.) You might be able to avoid this if you can get the window using Java AWT Native Interface to get the window ID. (Note that Swing is built on top of AWT, so this will work for Swing.) However, I'm not sure how to do this. It looks like you might be able to navigate the window tree by getting the root window from the Display and going from there to find your Window, but it's all kind of weird. It would be nice if the AWT NI just told you the window ID, but it doesn't look like it does that.
As this warning Reminder: XGrabKeyboard is not a security interface notes, this doesn't make it impossible for other programs to see the keys, but it seems likely that window managers will not be using XQueryKeyMap so it is likely to prevent task switching.
I'm looking to write a relatively simple key macro for my own edification and also for my own use.
I intend for it to be able to run in the background when I run other programs, and at the press of a button will enter certain text into the active window. To be more specific, I want to go in a video game and use it to automatically send messages instead of having to type them.
I Googled around a bit, but apparently I'm not using the right keywords because I'm not really sure where to start. The closest I came was finding the Keystroke class, but that appears to be used for receiving keystrokes, not sending them.
I would appreciate and info regarding, or directing me to a resource for, these issues (how to send keystrokes to windows and anything about targeting which window etc).
To send key strokes you can use java.awt.Robot
To Choose which window to activate you can look around for ws script (windows script) or old VB6 code and use it to make VB script (simple text file of extn .vbs)
Or you can junk all that and use http://www.autohotkey.com/ which has window activation, sending keys, doing things on press of certain keys (like Windows Key + B) or macros.
To get a window to activate I had made an exe long back, but no longer use it, can get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/win-utils/files/Window-Position/rel%2001/ (but only get this if the others do not work as need to seperately get COMCTL32.ocx and install that
If you do not want to use autohotkey you can use Jini to call platform specific functions, with a wrapper to call correst OSes functions. Never done it my self, when i had to use it i would make a process to call a exe that made the window come the front.
Is there a way to detect key input when the window is not active? That is, another application is running but the program is triggered when say the F9 key is pressed or something along those lines.
Is that possible or is java not compatible for such functions? From what I found java can't get input unless it's the active window.
Note:
I typically use keylistener, which seems to stop working (with good reason) when I am not actively using the program.
It sounds like you want low level keyboard hooks.
Get global keyboard input with Java
It's not directly possible in Java (i.e. with pure Java code), but you could reference other libraries (or make your own) to acheieve this. A quick google search gives a lot of references and free/open libraries that can give you keyboard and mouse hooks (both very handy).
Hope that helps.
Is it possible to detect a mouse click anywhere on a screen, outside of my application?
I have written an application to do this in C#, but would like to write a version of this in Java so that it can be run on several platforms.
It looks like I can get the co-ordinates of the mouse at any time with java.awt.MouseInfo.getPointerInfo() but I am not sure as to how to listen for a mouse click.
In C# I used GetAsyncKeyState to detect whether the mouse button was clicked, but obviously I cannot use this if I wish to keep this "clean" for use in multiple platforms.
You can do this only with platform specific implementation of the OS API, as you can't detect clicks outside from your program in your program itself.
While you won't get around writing platform specific code, just abstract it as an interface and use different implementations appropiately.
I want to be able to record mouse movements, clicks and keyboard input from a user. It would be great if it was a cross platform solution.
I'd like to get back something like this (pseudo code):
mouse moved to 500, 500
mouse double clicked
mouse moved to 800, 300
mouse left clicked
keyboard typed "Hello World"
Does either C++ or Java have any classes that can do this? If I was using C++, I would probably working with the QT framework.
Edit:
I should have said this originally, but I want to record the movements and clicks outside of the applications gui, so on the desktop too.
GLUT does this, but it's tied to OpenGL which might be overkill for your project.
OpenGL is cross-platform.
I don't believe there's a cross-platform toolkit specifically for grabbing input from a window and nothing more, but most toolkits provide this capability. Two good options are:
Use SDL, as it's fairly lightweight and can handle simple input.
Implement the functionality natively per platform, as it should be trivial in X11, Windows, Mac OS X, etc.
On Windows, this is called a Journal Record Hook. You should write the hook part in C or C++, it might be technically possible to do in java, but it's not a good idea, you want your hook procedure to have as few dependencies as possible, and to be a quick as possible. System wide hooks, especially journal add a lot of overhead to keyboard and mouse input, you want to minized your impact as much as possible.
You Install Windows hooks by using SetWindowsHookEx passing WH_JOURNALRECORD to get a Journal Record Hook.
You could also (maybe) get this working by installing both WH_KEYBOARD_LL and WH_MOUSE_LL, but your two hook procedures would be called separately, and you would have to write your own code to put the events in order.
I doubt you will find a cross-platform solution.
It sounds like Qt might allow you to implement event filters that extend beyond the application to the window system. See also Qt - top level widget with keyboard and mouse event transparency?
If you want to trap events across the whole GUI system, not just one app, there's not much likelihood of a cross platform solution. However, the event hooking part could easily be separated from the recording part, so you could make most of the program cross-platform.
For Windows, you need this 17 year old (!) document. (Man, I'm getting old!)