Make "Character Viewer" be in focus

[iamdannywyatt]

I’m using Keyboard Maestro to achieve this at the moment, but I would like to know if it’s possible to do this using AppleScript?
I’m not too familiar with AS, just the very basic things.

Here’s my Keyboard Maestro post with all the information

Make "Character Viewer" be in focus

[iamdannywyatt]

Thank you for the replies.
I’m a bit confused, though, and I’m not sure if I was able to explain what I’m experiencing. Let me try it again.

So regardless of the app I’m using at the moment, when I hit the shortcut to open the Character Viewer, I see this (never mind the tab. In this case it’s the arrows, but it could be any other tab):

So as you can see the window is not in focus, so if I start typing what I want to search (for example a specific emoji), it starts typing in the app (for example TextEdit) instead of the search field in the Character Viewer.

So when I click the window, then I get this

As you can see, the window is now in focus and whatever I type, goes in the search field, not TextEdit.

I was looking at your script, and even though I’m not knowledgeable enough, I couldn’t understand if that’s doing what I’m trying to achieve?

[iamdannywyatt]

So for example, my Keyboard Maestro macro is this:

So what it does is, when I hit Control+CMD+Space, it pauses the macro until it finds this image on the screen:

When it does, it resumes the macro and it clicks -30px above that same image, which ends up being the top bar of the Character Viewer, making it be in focus.

[iamdannywyatt]

@Fredrik71

You could drag the Character View to position on the screen manually. It will remember the x, y coordinate next time it opens.

And use System Events to click at {x, y} x and y is integer.
To get the x, y on your screen you could use the app Digital Color Meter

This would be less predictable than the one I have now using Keyboard Maestro where, no matter where the window is, it will always find it, because it’s relying on an image, not coordinates, which could (and will definitely) change all the time.

@Fredrik71

The Character viewer is not an window you could do GUI Scripting from AppleScript

Ok, no worries then. I will stick to Keyboard Maestro then.

Really appreciate your time and help!

[robertfern]

I have a sample script below that will bring the Character viewer to the front in the App “TextEdit”.

tell application "TextEdit" to activate
delay 1
tell application "System Events"
	set appName to short name of (process 1 whose frontmost is true)
	if (name of processes) contains "CharacterPalette" then
		tell process "CharacterPalette" --"Emoji & Symbols"
			if exists window "Character Viewer" then
				tell window "Character Viewer" to perform action "AXRaise"
				delay 5
			end if
		end tell
	end if
end tell

and here is a more complex version that will make sure the “Character Viewer” window is open.

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use scripting additions

tell application "TextEdit" to activate
delay 0.5

tell application "System Events"
	set appName to short name of (process 1 whose frontmost is true)
	set flag to true
	if (name of processes) contains "CharacterPalette" then
		tell process "CharacterPalette"
			if (count windows) > 0 then set flag to false
		end tell
	end if
	if flag then
		tell application process appName
			click menu item "Emoji & Symbols" of menu "Edit" of menu bar 1
			delay 1
		end tell
	end if
	tell process "CharacterPalette" --"Emoji & Symbols"
		if name of window 1 is not in {"Characters", "Character Viewer"} then
			perform action "AXPress" of button 1 of UI element 1 of row 1 of table 1 of scroll area 1 of pop over 1 of window 1
			delay 0.5
		end if
		if exists window "Characters" then
			click button 2 of window "Characters"
			delay 0.5
		end if
		if exists window "Character Viewer" then
			tell window "Character Viewer" to perform action "AXRaise"
			delay 3 -- this will let the window be shown as active (not needed)
		end if
	end tell
end tell