- user presses a keystroke
- the HID Manager portion of IOKit handles an interrupt, reads the
keyboard data, and notifies the Window Server
- the Window Server is a separate process that is part of the
CoreGraphics framework. It routes user input events to the
appropriate process (the process that currently has keyboard focus)
- the Window Server gets the event and signals a mach port for the
focused process
- the focused process's run loop wakes up because of the signal on
its mach port and reads the input event from the Window Server
I was trying to find more information about how these two steps
worked, but couldn't find anything. Is it possible for an
application other than the Window Server to get a copy of that port,
and if so, how is it used?
- the focused process converts the input event into a Carbon event
(note that this is true for Cocoa apps as well, since the Cocoa
event system uses Carbon events for its lowest-level event receipt)
and posts it into the Carbon event queue
Okay, so all applications receive low level Carbon events? These
would be of the kEventRawKey... type, correct? And then does the
standard window handler or whatever convert those raw key events into
higher level events for the application to handle? Is an event
posted to the application's main event queue indistinguishable from
an event sent to the application by the Window Server, and will that
work for Cocoa applications? If so, then the mach_inject method is
still a possibility.
- the focused process pulls the next event from the Carbon event
queue and returns it to the app as a Carbon Event, EventRecord, or
NSEvent, depending on the type of app
If you need to insert keyboard events and mouse events into another
application, most likely the best way to do this will be to use the
APIs in CoreGraphics/CGRemoteOperation.h, which are designed for
this purpose.
My concern with doing it that way is that I only want the application
I specifically target to receive these events. If I use the remote
operation APIs, then it looks like I'll need to find some way to keep
track of what the focussed application is and only send events when
my target is focussed. Alternatively I suppose my testing program
could force the target application to take focus and then I'd have to
not touch anything and hope no other programs jump to the foreground
while the testing is running. That seems fragile, and I don't know
if I can make another specific application take the focus. I also
worry that there might be a race condition where I'd check if my
target is focussed, then focus would change to a different
application before I sent the event, and the wrong application would
receive my synthetic event.
Any further ideas or advice?
-Greg
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