MacOS includes an app called the Accessibility Inspector, which we frequently use during development:
The most useful feature is that you can click the "crosshair" button and then hover over a certain element in a different app to see its attributes.
While the inspector is nice, it has a few weaknesses:
Limited voice control -- it has a couple of keyboard shortcuts but that's it
Squats on the alt-space shortcut while running (makes it harder to quickly use).
Similarly, if an element is selected it draws a persistent green box around it. Normally this is fine but it makes for observing things long term annoying
After using the inspector, you frequently will want to iterate on what you've just inspected using the Talon REPL, but this requires context switch + manually copying information. A first party Talon integration could allow for faster switching.
Thanks to the new ui.element_at() recently added to talon by aegis, we could build a replacement using Canvas. It could serve as a semitransparent sidebar that could be dragged anywhere and toggled on/off as necessary. It could also draw borders around the focused element and/or elements under the mouse.
nriley
commented
3 months ago
MacOS includes an app called the Accessibility Inspector, which we frequently use during development:
The most useful feature is that you can click the "crosshair" button and then hover over a certain element in a different app to see its attributes.
While the inspector is nice, it has a few weaknesses:
Thanks to the new
ui.element_at()recently added to talon by aegis, we could build a replacement using Canvas. It could serve as a semitransparent sidebar that could be dragged anywhere and toggled on/off as necessary. It could also draw borders around the focused element and/or elements under the mouse.