Gets the user selected text ?

[zsio]

How to get user selected text in other app ？

For example, select text in the browser 。

[zsio]

[FabianLars]

How to get user selected text in other app?

I don't think that this is possible at all. At least not if you don't target a specific app where you have access to stuff like this.

Apps and gui frameworks generally draw this themselves without necessarily telling the OS that text is selected or providing an API that other apps can call to get selected text.

The only thing that could be possible is to take a screenshot of the display and analyze that - this will very likely be really difficult, with many false detections.

In other words: Not possible.

[FabianLars]

that's so smart and simple, didn't even think about using the keyboard shortcut 😅

For input simulation there are crates like enigo, and for reading the clipboard crates like arboard or tauri's built-in clipboard manager (which will be backed-up by arboard in the future)

[zsio]

https://docs.rs/enigo/0.0.14/enigo/

This might work！ :)

Thank you for your reply.

I'm closing this discussion. thanks again.

[jackeydou]

Hi, I just have a crash in my app by using enigo to simulate command+c, have you ever met this problem? I'm looking for the reason all day.

[zsio]

I'm sorry, I was just looking for options

[geekyayush]

Have you guys figured it out? :) especially for windows?

[seidtgeist]

For macOS, I've worked around having to install an extension by using AppleScript:

import { readText, writeText } from "@tauri-apps/api/clipboard";
import { register, isRegistered } from "@tauri-apps/api/globalShortcut";
import { Command } from "@tauri-apps/api/shell";

const script = `
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "c" using {command down}
end tell
`;

const args = script
  .trim()
  .split("\n")
  .flatMap((line) => ["-e", line]);

const command = new Command("osascript", args);

async function sleep(ms: number) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
}

async function getSelectedText() {
  const initialClipboardContent = await readText();

  try {
    await command.spawn();

    await new Promise((resolve) => {
      command.on("close", resolve);
    });

    let attempts = 10;
    let currentClipboardContent = initialClipboardContent;

    while (
      attempts > 0 &&
      currentClipboardContent === initialClipboardContent
    ) {
      await sleep(100);
      currentClipboardContent = await readText();
      attempts--;
    }

    return currentClipboardContent;
  } finally {
    if (initialClipboardContent) {
      await writeText(initialClipboardContent);
    }
  }
}

async function main() {
  const shortcut = "Command+E";
  if (!(await isRegistered(shortcut))) {
    await register(shortcut, async () => {
      const text = await getSelectedText();

      document.body.innerHTML = text || "—";
    });
  }
}

main();