Text Expansion

[Thr1ve]

Would there be any way to do text expansion with robotjs like you can with AutoHotkey?

I was able to get robotjs working with electron so I could listen for global keypresses, but electron (and nw.js) only seems to be able to listen for key combinations, not key sequences.

It would be amazing if we could simply turn any key-presses / mouse-movements into events and/or observables so we could deal with them purely in node-land ( and perhaps use something fancy like http://reactivex.io/ so we could just map/filter/etc the keypresses )

Robotjs is/will be great for sending keyboard commands etc., but I think we'd need a reliable way to listen for these events globally to come close to AutoHotkey. Is there perhaps a node module I haven't found that strictly listens for keypresses / mouse movements globally and outputs them as events ? Surely someone must have written something like this already.

[fohara]

@Thr1ve I haven't seen a node module, but there is libuiohook , which could probably be wrapped with nan (or something), similar to how robotjs itself is designed.

[mwagstaff]

+1. Built-in text expansion capabilities similar to AutoHotkey would be a massive benefit.

[octalmage]

I generally use nw.js for hotkeys but as you mentioned its lacking. I'm hoping they improve that because I don't think I want to include hotkey support in RobotJS. If I do work on it, it will be a separate module. I think I'm going to do the same for window management.

[octalmage]

@Thr1ve but RobotJS can get the mouse position currently.

[octalmage]

@fohara thanks for the link! I'll try this library and if it works well, I'll turn it into a node module. It would be very easy.

[fohara]

@octalmage excellent. I was able to compile and run the demohook example (./configure --enable-demo) from the repo on OS X and it seemed to work well.

[octalmage]

Awesome! Can't wait to try it out.

[Thr1ve]

@octalmage Completely agree on the separate module thing; sorry if I implied otherwise! In my mind, there would be a really simple, small, and separate module that would solely listen for any keyboard / mouse events and then emit them as a events / streams / observables / whatever.
Second, there would be a layer ( also separate from robotjs; totally with you re: keeping hotkeys separate ) that could recognize key combinations / sequences and send the appropriate commands to robotjs. I would think we could easily bend/hack something like Mousetrap to work for this?

@fohara Thanks! Can't say I know how to make that work, but it looks like a good time to learn!

I've been dreaming of a javascript version of AutoHotkey for so long... major props to @octalmage for what he's done so far 👍

[octalmage]

Gotcha! I for sure will to try to replace each AHK feature with Node.js modules. If libuiohook works out we'll have a great start for key listening. I'll keep y'all updated!

[octalmage]

@fohara did you encounter this error?

hook_run [882]: Accessibility API is disabled!
Failed to enable access for assistive devices.

I tried adding it to the list of allowed accessibility apps, but that isn't helping.

[fohara]

@octalmage ah yes, I did encounter that accessibility error. My short term solution was to add iTerm (or any terminal app) to the allowed list. There is probably a more intuitive way of granting permission for this, but I haven't looked into it yet.

[octalmage]

Ah gotcha. This system is so silly. I had to remove and re-add iterm2.