baihe-autogui-inspect

baihe-autogui-inspect is a Windows GUI inspection companion for baihe-autogui. It helps you inspect desktop controls, browse UI trees, view element properties, and locate targets before writing automation scripts.

This project is based on the earlier pyside6-inspect work originally developed by Dmitry Vodopyanov and Alexander Smirnov. It is now packaged as a Baihe ecosystem tool and depends on baihe-autogui.

Features

• Browse the UI tree of running Windows applications
• Switch between uia, win32, and atspi backends
• Inspect properties of the selected element
• Pick an element directly from the desktop
• Highlight the selected or hovered element on screen
• Show timing information for inspection operations
• Write logs to both the console and a rotating log file

Requirements

• Windows
• Python >=3.8
• uv or pip

For Windows 7 compatibility, Python 3.8 environments are pinned to PySide6==6.1.3, which is the last PySide6 line this project treats as Win7-safe. Python 3.9 and newer resolve to a newer compatible PySide6 automatically.

Installation

Recommended for end users:

pip install "baihe-autogui[inspect]"

Or install the inspect tool directly:

pip install baihe-autogui-inspect

baihe-autogui[extra] remains available as a compatibility alias for the same extension set.

For local development:

uv sync

Or:

pip install -e .

Run

baihe-inspect

Or:

python -m baihe_autogui_inspect

Logging

By default, the app writes baihe_autogui_inspect.log in the current working directory.

Optional environment variables:

• BAIHE_AUTOGUI_INSPECT_LOG_LEVEL
• BAIHE_AUTOGUI_INSPECT_LOG_FILE

Example:

$env:BAIHE_AUTOGUI_INSPECT_LOG_LEVEL = "INFO"
$env:BAIHE_AUTOGUI_INSPECT_LOG_FILE = "logs\\inspect.log"
baihe-inspect

Development

Run tests:

python -m pytest -q

Run lint and type checks:

python -m ruff check src tests
python -m mypy src tests

Changelog

Release notes are tracked in CHANGELOG.md.