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m417z / Textify

A tool for Windows to copy text from dialogs and controls which don't allow it otherwise
https://ramensoftware.com/textify
GNU General Public License v3.0
907 stars 76 forks source link

Feature request: is it possible to capture all siblings' text? #20

Open popyoung opened 2 years ago

popyoung commented 2 years ago

Imagine I want to search for a word from Windows services. After opening a service dialog, I could capture the text of the item I clicked. However, I need to find a specific word from all the names of services. So technically speaking, is it possible to capture all the text of which are siblings of the item I clicked?

m417z commented 2 years ago

It is possible to implement code that iterates over all accessibility controls and grabs the text. It can be a nice feature, but that's not something that Textify can do at this point. I'll consider implementing it in one of the future versions, but it's not a priority.

There's also the SysExporter tool which you might find useful. It's also designed to grab text from Windows controls, but it doesn't use accessibility, so the result can be slightly different.

popyoung commented 2 years ago

I have tried SysExporter as you mentioned. Like other tools of Nirsoft, SysExporter works but is not friendly to users. Looking forward to your work. I will use SysExporter as a substitution until that.

GH01 commented 2 years ago

+1

In SysExporter it's easy to get the text from a single column (or selected columns). Yet I also expect there's a tool that can grab selected column(s) with one blow.

By the way, other tools I know:

HyperSnap: Can capture visible text from a screen area with its TextSnap feature. So one can capture wanted column(s) by hiding other columns first. However, it needs time to auto-scroll if the list is very long. Sometimes the capture could fail midway.

GetWindowText: Grabs the whole list at just one blow. The result is in TSV format. However, it just grabs the whole list, no column can be hidden away.