Finding the Current Active Window in Mac OS X using Python

by

This should work:

#!/usr/bin/python

from AppKit import NSWorkspace
activeAppName = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace().activeApplication()['NSApplicationName']
print activeAppName

Only works on Leopard, or on Tiger if you have PyObjC installed and happen to point at the right python binary in line one (not the case if you’ve installed universal MacPython, which you’d probably want to do on Tiger). But Peter’s answer with the Carbon way of doing this will probably be quite a bit faster, since importing anything from AppKit in Python takes a while, or more accurately, importing something from AppKit for the first time in a Python process takes a while.

If you need this inside a PyObjC app, what I describe will work great and fast, since you only experience the lag of importing AppKit once. If you need this to work as a command-line tool, you’ll notice the performance hit. If that’s relevant to you, you’re probably better off building a 10 line Foundation command line tool in Xcode using Peter’s code as a starting point.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I determine if my python shell is executing in 32bit or 64bit?
  2. How to uninstall Anaconda completely from macOS
  3. Mac OSX python ssl.SSLError: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:749)
  4. Cannot install Lxml on Mac OS X 10.9
  5. How do I upgrade to Python 3.6 with conda?
  6. Python: source code string cannot contain null bytes
  7. What is the most compatible way to install python modules on a Mac?
  8. How to reinstall python@2 from Homebrew?
  9. Multiprocessing causes Python to crash and gives an error may have been in progress in another thread when fork() was called
  10. ImportError: No module named pip
  11. Why is Python easy_install not working on my Mac?
  12. How can my app detect a change to another app’s window?
  13. How can I install a previous version of Python 3 in macOS using homebrew?
  14. Psycopg2 image not found
  15. How to properly stop phantomjs execution
  16. pip installation /usr/local/opt/python/bin/python2.7: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
  17. PYTHONPATH not working for sudo on GNU/Linux (works for root)
  18. easy_install with various versions of python installed, mac osx
  19. Can’t install Tensorflow Mac
  20. Can’t install pygame on mac
  21. “ERROR:root:code for hash md5 was not found” when using any hg mercurial commands
  22. Getting “cannot write mode P as JPEG” while operating on JPG image
  23. Unicode encoding for filesystem in Mac OS X not correct in Python?
  24. Upgrade Python to 2.6 on Mac
  25. Trigger an event when clipboard content changes
  26. Xcode linker error: file too small for architecture x86_64
  27. Conda: Creating a virtual environment
  28. Mac + virtualenv + pip + postgresql = Error: pg_config executable not found
  29. viewDidLoad in NSViewController?
  30. Listen to a value change of my text field

Leave a Comment