Hammerspoon: Ability to select menu bar menu items

[waynehoover]

Hello,

I have some 3rd party menu bar items I would like to simulate a click on from HS, is this possible?

[cmsj]

I'm not aware of an API for getting the locations of the menubar items of 3rd party apps, so at the moment I'd say this isn't possible, unfortunately

[miwagner1]

Do you mean stuff like file, edit, view etc? Or the icons on the right side?

[cmsj]

@HoloWolf I assume that @waynehoover means the icons on the right (NSMenuItem objects).

[miwagner1]

A way around it for now would be to use something like Keyboard Maestro and use a workflow that looks for the picture of the item you want and then you can have it do something with the data like move the mouse etc. I don't know if this functionality is in hammerspoon. This might be something useful to look into adding.

[waynehoover]

Yes I was talking about NSMenuItem objects. I'll look into the Keyboard Maestro option, thanks. Feel free to close this issue or keep it around if you feel it could be useful.

[cmsj]

@waynehoover I'm going to close this issue and instead open a new one on the more generic option of detecting image content, which (if/when implemented) would allow for clicking on anything.

(FWIW, @HoloWolf is right, Keyboard Maestros image detection/clicking support works very well, I've used it myself).

[krasnovpro]

I've use this code for clicking on menubar item:

hs.hotkey.bind('shift-alt', '5', function()
  hs.applescript([[
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "GrabBox"
      ignoring application responses
        click menu bar item 1 of menu bar 2
      end ignoring
    end tell
    do shell script "killall System\\ Events"
    delay 0.1
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "GrabBox"
      click menu bar item 1 of menu bar 2
      click menu item "Pause GrabBox" of menu 1 of menu bar item 1 of menu bar 2
    end tell
  ]])
end)

[jpulgarin]

@krasnovpro's AppleScript didn't work for me in macOS Sierra. This slightly modified version works though:

ignoring application responses
  tell application "System Events"
    click menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 of application process "GrabBox"
  end tell
end ignoring
do shell script "killall System\\ Events"
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
  click menu item "Pause GrabBox" of menu 1 of menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 of application process "GrabBox"
end tell