Thanks! Those both work on both systems and are more compact than “ and nearly twice as fast as “ my effort. The ‘grep’ version may possibly be very slightly faster than the ‘awk’, but it’s too close a call to be sure. They’re still several times slower than Jon’s Commands, but since that’s apparently not going to be ported for Intel machines, I’m keeping an eye on the alternatives!
set screenRes to screen size of beginning of (screen list starting with main screen) -- Needs Jon's Commands.
No problem, Adam, this returns the values for two screens ({x1, y1, x2, y2})
tell (do shell script "defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver DisplaySets | awk '/ Height =/||/ Width =/'") to set screenRes to {word 6 as integer, word 3 as integer, word 12 as integer, word 9 as integer}
I see that the very first key in the “com.apple.windowserver” domain is “CGSInterocitorSelectMode”. An interocitor, of course, is an alien device from the 1954 Sci-Fi film This Island Earth. There are quite a few people having fun with it on the Net. I quite enjoyed this effort. (Follow the “About this page” link for more information.)
When I read the link you gave and look back at CGSInterocitor’s value, mine is an integer set to zero. Is that universal or does it vary from country to country? If the latter, then it’s a quite suitable name for identifying “aliens” presuming the “0” means USA.
A cursory search through Apple Docs did not find much about com.apple.windowserver, however, and nothing about CGSInterocitor, so I have no idea what it’s for.
It errors in Jaguar (“Illegal operation”) but returns a list of numeric Unicode texts in Tiger. For a single screen, we’d need something like this:
tell (do shell script "defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver DisplaySets | sed -Ee '/^ *(Height|Width)/!d' -e 's/[^[:digit:]]*//g'") to set screenRes to {paragraph 2 as integer, paragraph 1 as integer}
Interestingly enough, after posting that, I tried changing the value to “1” to see what would happen and actually turned into an alien for a while. Fortunately, I was able to slither into a vat of dinitrogen tetrasulphide while I restored the backup and, after a good night’s sleep and a cup of tea, am apparently no worse off for the experience. But thank goodness I didn’t try the “2” setting! :o
After fiddling around for a short while, I’ve finally settled on this. It should hopefully return a list of records, but unfortunately I’m unable to test it on more than one display.
run script ("{" & (do shell script "defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver DisplaySets | sed -Ee '/^ *(Height|Width)/!d' -e 's/Height = (.*);/{height: \\1,/' -e 's/Width = (.*);/width: \\1},/' -e 's/ *$/¬/'")'s text 1 thru -3 & "}")
I presume that, as the last one died of an obscure error, this too will fail on Jaguar.
Edit: Thanks Stefan, my fault. The script has been changed.
FWIW, Extra Suites may come in handy when changing screenresolutions AND depth on a fly (here for single screen):
tell application "Extra Suites" to set g to ES list screen resolutions screen 0
set y to {}
repeat with x in g
if x is g's last item as string then set x to " depth " & x
set y to y & my substitute(x, "x", "*")
end repeat
tell application "System Events" to set fApp to some application process whose frontmost is true
beep 2
tell fApp
activate
set fWd to name of window 1
set fWd2 to name of front window
set nRes to (choose from list y default items {item 3 of y} with prompt "Set screen resolution to: ")
end tell
if nRes = false then return
set nRes to nRes as string
set {nH, nV, dept} to {nRes's word 1, nRes's word 3, nRes's word 5} --return {nH, nV}
tell application "Extra Suites"
set sInfo to ES screen info
if width of sInfo ≠nH and height of sInfo ≠nV then
ES set screen resolution width nH height nV depth dept
end if
set sInfo to ES screen info
set {W, H} to {sInfo's width, sInfo's height}
end tell
tell fApp
activate
try
open window 1
end try
try
open window fWd
end try
try
open window fWd2
end try
return name of window 1
end tell
on substitute(theText, toReplace, newText)
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the toReplace
set the allTheText to every text item of theText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the newText
set theText to the allTheText as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
return theText
end substitute
An AppleScript list of records! Terrific! The list I get on my Tiger machine contains seventeen records, the first of which and six more refer to the single monitor’s current resolution. The remaining ten refer to another resolution to which I’ve set it in the past. None of the other possible resolutions are included, so this can’t be the right file for that information. Only the first one or two entries can thus have any relevance.
The script still doesn’t work with Jaguar, I’m afraid. But I must apologise to you for some bad information. The error isn’t “Illegal operation” but “illegal option”. (Perhaps the interocitor interfered with my brainwaves the other evening!) In full, the message is:
The list I get on my Tiger machine contains seventeen records, the first of which and six more refer to the single monitor’s current resolution. The remaining ten refer to another resolution to which I’ve set it in the past. None of the other possible resolutions are included, so this can’t be the right file for that information. Only the first one or two entries can thus have any relevance.