plover-run-applescript 0.1.0

Run AppleScripts from Plover

Plover Run AppleScript

This Plover extension plugin contains a command that can load in and run external AppleScript files.

The Problem

The reason this plugin exists is because of pain. The following is an example of how I used to run AppleScripts from my Plover dictionaries to perform some kind of automation task that could only be done on macOS using AppleScript:

"W-D": "{:COMMAND:SHELL:bash -ci 'osascript $STENO_DICTIONARIES/src/command/text/move-one-word-forward.scpt'}"

This solution does the following:

• uses the Plover Run Shell plugin to run a shell command from Python
• calls bash in interactive mode (-i) so that the command can see environment variables ($STENO_DICTIONARIES in this case) outside of the Plover environment
• gets bash to use the osascript command-line tool to load in and run the target compiled AppleScript (.scpt file)

Running AppleScripts is generally slow, and constantly running one-off commands that traverse a stack of Python->Shell->osascript made them even slower.

So, this plugin leverages PyXA to talk directly to Apple's APIs from Python, and keeps a local cache of loaded scripts to avoid needing to re-read in AppleScript files every time a command is run.

The above command now looks like this:

"W-D": "{:COMMAND:APPLESCRIPT:$STENO_DICTIONARIES/src/command/text/move-one-word-forward.scpt}"

The result is that commands at least feel like they run significantly faster, and I'm pretty sure it's because they actually are (but I don't have any hard benchmarks to objectively prove this).

Install

Until this plugin is added to the Plover registry, download from GitHub or clone using git:

git clone [e-mail]:paulfioravanti/plover-run-applescript.git
cd plover-run-applescript
plover -s plover_plugins install .

Where plover in the command is a reference to your locally installed version of Plover. See the Invoke Plover from the command line page for details on how to create that reference.

• Restart Plover, open the Configuration screen (either click the Configuration icon, or from the main Plover application menu, select Preferences...)
• Open the Plugins tab
• Check the box next to plover_run_applescript to activate the plugin

[Future] Once this plugin is added to the Plover registry:

1. In the Plover application, open the Plugins Manager (either click the Plugins Manager icon, or from the Tools menu, select Plugins Manager).
2. From the list of plugins, find plover-run-applescript
3. Click "Install/Update"
4. When it finishes installing, restart Plover
5. After re-opening Plover, open the Configuration screen (either click the Configuration icon, or from the main Plover application menu, select Preferences...)
6. Open the Plugins tab
7. Check the box next to plover_run_applescript to activate the plugin

How To Use

Development

Clone from GitHub with git:

git clone [e-mail]:paulfioravanti/plover-run-applescript.git
cd plover-run-applescript

Python Version

Plover's Python environment currently uses version 3.9 (see Plover's workflow_context.yml to confirm the current version).

So, in order to avoid unexpected issues, use your runtime version manager to make sure your local development environment also uses Python 3.9.x.

PyXA Version

This plugin depends on PyXA for all Python<->AppleScript interoperations. The dependency is currently pinned at version 0.0.9 due to later versions of PyXA using Python 3.10 syntax (match case etc) that is too new for Plover's Python version.

Testing

Currently, all parts of this extension rely directly on Plover's environment, which makes testing difficult. So, as of now, no automated tests exist, and all testing has been done manually.

Linting

Attempts have been made to have at least some kind of code quality baseline with Pylint. Run the linter over the codebase with the following command:

pylint plover_run_applescript

Testing Changes

After making any code changes, install the plugin into Plover with the following command:

plover -s plover_plugins install .

Where plover in the command is a reference to your locally installed version of Plover. See the Invoke Plover from the command line page for details on how to create that reference.