XWindows

Linux python client for Xserver to access windows information and automate keypresses

Table of contents

• About the package
  • Problems
  • Solutions
• Resources
• Documentation
  • Installing
  • Importing
  • Initialising
• Methods
  • Get Active Windows
  • Get Window Screen
  • Get Window Slice
  • Press Key
• Author
• Features Planned to add

About the package

I created this package mainly to solve some problems I faced using opencv on linux.

Problems

• Obtaining Window screen in fast and efficient way
  • Every time we want to capture screen we have to take screen shot with 3rd party packages like pyautogui and then convert into opencv image which is both slow and inefficient.
• No modules like pywin32 for linux to access internal apis

Solutions

• This package provides native Xserver interaction from python using python-xlib package.
• This package provides the following features
  • Get active windows (active means all the visual application windows)
  • Get geometry of a particular window (height, width, x, y coordinates)
  • Get screenshot of a particular window in raw bytes or PIL image format
  • Automate keypresses

Since all these operations are done using native apis you will experience increase in performance

Resources

• native xlib documentation
  • This documentation is written for C / C++ language and you need to have a bit of knowledge to understand this documentation.
  • No availability of lot of examples makes it even harder for beginners to understand the documentation.
• python-xlib documentation
  • The documentation is still not completed but the devs are updating it continuosly.
• My Notes
  • I have noted down some important topics to understand XServer and xlib library documentation. Hope it helps :)

Documentation

Installation

pip install XWindows

If you use python3, then use following command

pip3 install XWindows

Importing

import XWindows

# If you want to import seperate components

from XWindows import windows
from XWindows import keys

# If you want to import seperate components and functionality
# This way of importing is preffered cause you don't have to add whole namespace again and again
# This will be used to explain the features further

from XWindows.windows import Windows
from XWindows.keys import Keys

Initialising

# intialising windows object
windows = Windows()

# dispose windows object
windows.dispose()

Methods

Get Active windows

• Here active indicates the visual application windows

activeWindows = windows.getActiveWindows()
print(activeWindows)

# The result will be list of tuples of (window_id, window_title)
# [
#   (29360135, 'firstPy'), 
#   (33554442, 'python3'), 
#   (39845895, b'windows.py - firstPy - Visual Studio Code'), 
#   (39845920, b'test.py - XWindows - Visual Studio Code'), 
#   (52428803, b'Linux get Window (python) \xe2\x80\x94 Mozilla Firefox')
# ]

# These window_id's change everytime you close and open a particular window

Get Window geometry

# Syntax windows.getWindowGeometry(window_id)

geometry = windows.getWindowGeometry(29360135)
print(geometry)

# returns a tuple of (x, y, width, height)
# (302, 141, 1375, 691)

Get Window Screen

# syntax: windows.getWindowScreen(window_id, bytes_format=False)
# syntax: windows.getWindowScreen(window_id, bytes_format=True) for raw data

# returns image in PIL Image format
screen = windows.getWindowScreen(29360135)

# returns tuple of (image in bytes, image width, image height)
screen_bytes_format = windows.getWindowScreen(29360135, bytes_format=True)

Get Window Slice

• Use this to get certain portion of a screen

# syntax: windows.getWindowSlice(window_id, x, y, width, height)
# syntax: windows.getWindowSlice(window_id, x, y, width, height, bytes_format=True)

window_id = 29360135
(x, y, width, height) = windows.getWindowGeometry(window_id)

# returns data in PIL Image format
window_slice = windows.getWindowSlice(window_id, x, y, width, height)

# return image data in bytes format
window_slice_bytes_format = windows.getWindowSlice(window_id, x, y, width, height)

Press Key

# syntax: windows.pressKey([keysyms,], window_id)
# all keysyms are accessible using windows.keys

# this below sends A keys pressed signal to window with id window_id
windows.pressKey([windows.keys.A], window_id)

• [keysyms,] - list of keys you want to simulate
• send the keys in the order you would press in keyboard
• for example [windows.keys.A,] = [windows.keys.Shift_L, windows.keys.a]

Author

sleepingsaint @github

Contributions or PR's of any kind are appreciated

Features Planned to add

[ ] Automate mouse movements
[ ] Get windows with title rather than window_id