Grab URL if front-most-facing application is a Browser on macOS

[dougpagani]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm not sure this is a problem or if it's abnormal behavior, but on macos, from espanso detect, I get:

If you'll notice, the bundle id is used for the window title. This is the same for all apps I've tried w/ espanso detect running.

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Describe the solution you'd like
There are two additional pieces of information that could be garnered from macos:

1. Title, for all apps
2. URL, if it is a browser

1. Title, for all apps

I'm not sure if there's a reason why this hasn't been developed, but this info is accessible via kCGWindowName in macos:

... which will yield something like:
windowTitle: 'Unicorns - Google Search'

2. URL, if it is a browser

And then for URL, that can be obtained via osascript (CAVEAT: this is not a fast call like kCGWindowName afaik):

... which will yield something like:
url: 'https://sindresorhus.com/unicorn'

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Describe alternatives you've considered
n/a

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Additional context
This would add value since we're moving towards a world of webapps where the front-most app is virtually indistinguishable from the point of view of bundle-id's and such, but is really quite different.

[federico-terzi]

Hey @dougpagani,

Thank you for the feedback!

1. Title, for all apps

The new v2 introduced support for the window titles that was missing in the previous version, so we could consider this one solved :)

2. URL, if it is a browser
   And then for URL, that can be obtained via osascript (CAVEAT: this is not a fast call like kCGWindowName afaik):

Thanks! This is interesting. Given that Espanso polls the active application for this information (exec, title, class) approximately every second, this approach might have a negative impact on performance, so we should think about a way to mitigate the overhead. Perhaps, we could scan the URL only if certain conditions are met (like the window title being equal to something), but that would possibly require a significant change to the detection logic :)

This would add value since we're moving towards a world of webapps where the front-most app is virtually indistinguishable from the point of view of bundle-id's and such, but is really quite different.

Do you think having the window title might solve this problem?

Cheers :)

[dougpagani]

Hi @federico-terzi (This post is purely for your knowledge, and so to save you some time, I time-linked the video -- it's a quick 1-minute show of the steno system's macros. I know you're in "stepping away" mode with the project, but I figured I'd close a good conversation now that I found a very high-efficiency analogue demo for you as a matter of general knowledge.)

, I can't find the other conversation we had a while ago where I had asked for a mechanism to be able to back-query the last expansion - and you asked something like "can you show/explain an example of why that would be useful?"

I just came across a very succinct demo of what I think is mostly perfect design of handling of "User-Bankable apps", which Espanso is very much so one of, in this video on a steno system:

https://youtu.be/hLgf-Zkte48?si=INQ4WdNijuYog8ri&t=1m

BANKINGS META COMMANDS:
- 1: FOCUS the app
- 2: ADD translation
- If untranslated-stroke was entered, then it prompts for a translation. (Prefilling the stroke)
- If finger-spelled, then it prompts for a stroke. (Prefilling the translation)
- 3: SEARCH translations
- 4: TOGGLE active

In my opinion, to satisfy "fluent self-growth", it is only missing an "EDIT translation", which could just be overloaded behavior of "ADD", such that the last stroke is opened & hoisted for fixing.

I've built a lot of applets like Espanso, and I've found that the highest bandwidth comes from when you have a context-aware (ADD/EDIT)-FROM-LAST command, when possible with a "mappings-bindings candidate log" (which Espanso has by virtue of needing to resolve triggers to expansions).

I wanted to expose the "last candidate" for an expansion because this would enable an ADD-FROM-LAST. I do this for virtually everything and it makes for good software design, especially software meant for other software developers. "alias-last()" on the shell would be another easily understood example of this.

Sure, the key logging thing is somewhat of a concern, but it only expands the scope of memory from 1 word to 2, so I really don't think it's that much more of a security risk. If you could query the last trigger from the CLI-tool, you could easily write a system shortcut to pull up & navigate to the YAML entry & quickly edit it. Would reduce expansion-iteration time from ~1 minute per fixup to ~2 seconds. And extension/growth of the expansions bank would be likewise, incredibly easy, but this doesn't require much help from Espanso if it isn't built-in, as you can just use clipboard content + zenity-GUI-prompt-script which prefills the expansion and prompts for you to fill the trigger (then auto-formatting the YAML entry and dumping it into a valid search-path file as appended text).