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POGenerate keyboard events for the frontmost application
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copied!<p>In Mac OS / Cocoa, may I <strong>synthesize keyboard entries</strong> - strings - for the frontmost application in a transparent way?</p> <p>To be more precise, I don't want to send special characters or control sequences. My only need is to <strong>send standard characters</strong>.</p> <p>Just learned <a href="http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=436511" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, that AppleScript can do the trick like this:</p> <pre><code>tell application "TextEdit" activate tell application "System Events" keystroke "f" using {command down} end tell end tell </code></pre> <p><strong>Q: How would I do this using ObjC / cocoa?</strong></p> <p><strong>UPDATE 2012-02-18 - Nicks proposal enhanced</strong></p> <p>Based on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/9137/nick">Nick</a>'s code below, here is the final solution:</p> <pre><code>// First, get the PSN of the currently front app ProcessSerialNumber psn; GetFrontProcess( &psn ); // make some key events CGEventRef keyup, keydown; keydown = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent (NULL, (CGKeyCode)6, true); keyup = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent (NULL, (CGKeyCode)6, false); // forward them to the frontmost app CGEventPostToPSN (&psn, keydown); CGEventPostToPSN (&psn, keyup); // and finally behave friendly CFRelease(keydown); CFRelease(keyup); </code></pre> <p>Using this method, a click on a button of a non-activating panel targets the event to the actual front application. Perfectly what I want to do.</p>

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