Support for MacOS

[wangtubs]

hi, I find pywinauto can't be used on macbook.
do you have a plan for support on macbook?

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Hi @wangtubs, we have a long term plan for MacOS support, but not this year.
Linux AT-SPI should come faster than MacOS. Can't provide any ETA on MacOS. It's going very slowly.

I can recommend you pyatom/ATOMac for now. It should be usable. My students were able to do some automation with this tool.

In open source field there is only 1 cross-platform tool that uses accessibility technologies on all three OS families (Win/Lin/Mac). It's LDTP grown from Linux Desktop Testing Project. pyatom is LDTP-compatible by API so it can be considered as MacOS part of LDTP, but pyatom is self-containing tool as well.

I've heard some negative feedback about LDTP API (it's ugly, tests are hard to maintain), but personally I never used it. So if you have positive opinion about that tool please share it.

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Though in this rating pyatom is not growing.

[ekostadinov]

@vasily-v-ryabov do you, have better idea now or raw roadmap for when Mac OS will be supported? I really like what pywinauto can do, but the true multi-platform is what I need.

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Hi @ekostadinov we're making some progress in walking the elements hierarchy, but have some problems with keyboard input emulation on macOS. This issue is reported in pyobjc repo but we didn't try pure ObjectiveC code yet (might be not a pyobjc problem).

I can assume workable prototype at the end of this year and the first macOS release around summer 2019 with current resources.

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Keyboard input doesn't work specifically on latest HighSierra, on previous Sierra OS it works. Didn't compare with pyautogui and pyatom yet.

[nitinrgoyal]

Hi guys, any update on this one, and has anyone tried on Mojave.

Summer of 2019 has started officially 😀

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Hi @nitinrgoyal there was no much activity on macOS backend last year. We have little progress implementing class Application, but nothing is ready to merge.

But we have some good news: one guy is going to work on this project for the whole summer (internship at Lobachevsky State University). So I expect good progress on macOS backend implementation till the end of this summer.

BTW, calendar summer in Russia officially starts on June, 1. :)

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Good news guys! See #841 for our progress after this summer. There is still plenty of work left. But it's doable for some observable horizon like 1 or 2 years to be ready for release.

[romain130492]

@vasily-v-ryabov its not supported on mac right ? thanks

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Hi @romain130492 macOS support is planned (see PR #841 and we have some branches in forks, currently one student is working on macOS code). I would say we have something close to ~alpha quality. If you're interested in early testing, please let us know.

Unfortunately there is no exact release date for macOS. But @dariacher is going to present her Master's Degree work in June 2022. So there is some hope it will be included into 0.7.0 (which is currently for Linux support + some general re-factoring).

[ggoliev]

Hi, @vasily-v-ryabov.
How can I join the macOS early testing?

[vasily-v-ryabov]

Hi @ggoliev sure, you can try to install macOS branch so:

pip uninstall -y pywinauto
pip install https://github.com/dariacher/pywinauto/archive/refs/heads/mac_coverage.zip

Any feedback can be posted here or in PR #1213 which is the most fresh macOS branch.

[vasily-v-ryabov]

@romain130492 what is the reason of dislike? No exact deadlines is also painful to me, but it's a hobby project and nobody can wait for hard working on it. I don't worry too much about dislikes. I'm just curious if there is some huge demand of this or any other respectful reason.

[ggoliev]

@vasily-v-ryabov, could we please connect outside the GitHub site?
My Gmail is my username here.
Thank you in advance.

[lpitkorbx]

Hi @vasily-v-ryabov. Were there any updates since 2022? Support for Mac would be awesome to have! I see latest updates were in may 2023 #1213. Do you know if there's a plan to finish that PR?