plover-run-applescript 0.3.8

Run AppleScripts from Plover

Plover Run AppleScript

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

Install

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

One-Liners

If your AppleScript is one line long, then you can use the code directly in your steno dictionary entry in the following way:

"KR-PL": "{:COMMAND:APPLESCRIPT:activate application \"Google Chrome\"}"

AppleScript Files

To run code in AppleScript files, create steno dictionary entry values that look like the following:

"KPH-PBD": "{:COMMAND:APPLESCRIPT:/path/to/your/applescript-file.scpt}"

[!NOTE] You can compile your .applescript files into .scpt files using the osacompile tool:

osacompile -o my-file.scpt my-file.applescript

The path to your AppleScript file can contain a local $ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE, which will get expanded. For example, if you have a line like the following in your .zshrc file:

export STENO_DICTIONARIES="$HOME/steno/steno-dictionaries"

You can use it in the command:

"KPH-PBD": "{:COMMAND:APPLESCRIPT:$STENO_DICTIONARIES/path/to/applescript-file.scpt}"

Sending Commands

If you want to test out a command before adding a steno dictionary entry containing it, you can use Plover's plover_send_command command-line tool. For example:

plover --script plover_send_command "APPLESCRIPT:activate application \"Google Chrome\""
plover --script plover_send_command "APPLESCRIPT:/path/to/your/applescript-file.scpt"

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.

Pressing the "Disconnect and reconnect the machine" button on the Plover UI resets the AppleScript script cache. If you make any changes to any AppleScript files, make sure to press it so the file will be re-read in again.

[!WARNING] Due to this issue with PyXA, which this plugin relies on to talk to Apple's APIs, any AppleScript files that are referenced in a Plover outline cannot contain lists in the code (denoted by curly braces; e.g. {"one", "two"}).

So, if you have code that looks like this:

keystroke "k" using {command down, shift down}

You will have to re-write it out longhand to be able to use it with this plugin, like so:

key down command
key down shift
keystroke "k"
key up shift
key up command

Or, extract the code you have that uses lists out into script libraries. I wrote about how I did this in Sharing AppleScript Handlers.

Update: The AppleScript-related issues have now been fixed, as can be seen in the issue. However, since those fixes are only in a version of PyXA that uses a Python version later than 3.9, we will have to wait until the Python version bundled in with Plover itself updates to at least 3.10 before this problem can be properly resolved.

The Problem

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}"

Development

Clone from GitHub with git:

git clone [e-mail]:paulfioravanti/plover-run-applescript.git
cd plover-run-applescript
python -m pip install --editable ".[test]"

If you are a Tmuxinator user, you may find my plover_run_applescript project file of reference.

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-to-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, and causes syntax errors.

Testing

• Pytest is used for testing in this plugin.
• Coverage.py and pytest-cov are used for test coverage, and to run coverage within Pytest
• Pylint is used for code quality
• Mypy is used for static type checking

Currently, the only parts able to be tested are ones that do not rely directly on Plover or PyXA.

Run tests, coverage, and linting with the following commands:

pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing
pylint plover_run_applescript
mypy plover_run_applescript

To get a HTML test coverage report:

coverage run --module pytest
coverage html
open htmlcov/index.html

If you are a just user, you may find the justfile useful during development in running multiple test commands. You can run the following command from the project root directory:

just --working-directory . --justfile test/justfile

Deploying Changes

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

plover --script plover_plugins install --editable .

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.

When necessary, the plugin can be uninstalled via the command line with the following command:

plover --script plover_plugins uninstall plover-run-applescript