Select a menu item in AppleScript without using “System Events” in 10.9 Mavericks

applescriptautomatorservices

I was just answering another question and was reminded of a new "feature" in Mavericks.

I used to have a number of small Automator Services that took no input but did something useful when tied to a keystroke. The perfect example was one to bring the Terminal to the front. Some of these required selecting a menu item in the application brought to the front such as Bring All to Front.

Now it seems you need to grant "accessability" to every single app so that a universal keystroke will work if the Service uses the System Events AppleScript library.

Anyone know a fix for this?

Best Answer

I don't know how to click menu items without using System Events, but if others get here searching for how to click menu items with System Events:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder"
    click menu item "New Finder Window" of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
end tell

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder"
    set frontmost to true
    click (menu item 1 where its name starts with "Compress") of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
end tell

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder"
    set frontmost to true
    tell menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
        click
        click menu item "Open With" of menu 1
    end tell
end tell

You can allow all currently installed applications to use the accessibility API by dragging them to the list in System Preferences:

Related Solutions

System-Preferences Applescript using osascript cannot select its window

So there are two ways this script can fail:

Command line version unable to get the System Preferences window.
Running it will cause the complaint about enabling access for assistive devices.

Well the latter case as it turns out is self-explanatory: This script requires that you have enabled access for assistive devices. The former is still not obvious, but if you quit System Preferences and restart it then it might work; it finally did for me, and I have amended the code above to get System Preferences to quit at the end.

AppleScript: Check if “System Events” has loaded

The System Events process does not start at login, so the delay might be needed for some other reason. System Events also teriminates automatically if it is not used for a few minutes.

It probably won't help, but you could try launching System Events at the start of the script:

launch application "System Events"

You could also try using a launchd agent like this to launch a System Events process at login:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>test</string>
  <key>Program</key>
  <string>/System/Library/CoreServices/System Events.app/Contents/MacOS/System Events</string>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key> <!-- run at login -->
  <true/>
  <key>KeepAlive</key> <!-- run the program again if the previous program terminates -->
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

You can normally use something like tell application "System Events" to exists process "Finder" to check if a process exists, but it obviously requires talking to System Events. In this case you might also use a shell script like this:

repeat 100 times
    do shell script "ps -eco comm= | grep -x 'System Events'; exit 0"
    if result is not "" then exit repeat
    delay 0.1
end repeat

ps -e is identical to -ax (include processes from all users and processes without a controlling terminals), -c prints command names instead of absolute paths in OS X, and -o comm= prints only command names without the header row. You can replace the shell command with pgrep -x 'System Events'; exit 0 in 10.8 and later.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

System-Preferences Applescript using osascript cannot select its window

AppleScript: Check if “System Events” has loaded

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