Allow UIAccess on Windows to work with elevated apps

[eugenesvk]

Kanata.exe will be able to work in elevated apps on Windows when this is merged.

But I couldn't make it work with your tray app. Even if both are signed in the same way with UIAccess enabled, and within Program Files, I get an error while loading kanata (and there are no logs since I guess logs are only available from kanata after it starts)

(also tried

• your app with UIA and regular kanata, launches, but doesn't work in elevated apps
• your app without UIA and UIA kanata, crashes )

Not sure if there is something special you need to do to load another UIA app, but would be nice if that were possible

[rszyma]

The prebult windows exe is compiled with -W=windowsgui to hide console window. But that also disables stdin/out, and there would probably be some more info about the error.

As aside, I'll soon be adding a button in tray menu to allow reading kanata-tray logs with the disabled console too. For now though if you want to logs, you need to compile it manually with that -W ldflag removed.

[rszyma]

The build command for windows is here https://github.com/rszyma/kanata-tray/blob/7739730dd21e057af4ef55fb350743f0fdaabeb0/justfile#L14-L15

[eugenesvk]

So it's how you launch it: you're still launching kanata.exe as a cli app with cli flags, and I get the same message when I try to launch kanata from a terminal, but double click works

Kanata process terminated with an error: failed to start process: fork/exec C:\Program Files\5 Util\6 Key&Mouse\kanata\kanata.exe: The requested operation requires elevation.

[rszyma]

https://gist.github.com/jerblack/d0eb182cc5a1c1d92d92a4c4fcc416c6 this seems like it could work

I rarely use Windows these days, it's unlikely I'll work on it. However PR's welcome

[eugenesvk]

That seems like a way to launch kanata elevated, but this isn't needed, UIAccess works without elevation on "double-click" launch.

[rszyma]

It could still be useful depending on whether we want entire kanata-tray app to be elavated (would all spawned subprocesses be elevated automatically too? Like in linux?) or popup UAC every time a preset is ran for which we explicitly declare (with an new option in config) that we want elevation for kanata.

Or even better, we could implement both, maybe.

[eugenesvk]

FYI found the following tidbid on launching UIAcceess apps:

UIAccess-enabled programs cannot be launched using CreateProcess and fail with ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED, but launching them using ShellExecute works without elevation

[rszyma]

Thanks for the info. Though, I've no plans to implement it, especially for Windows, because I've recently uninstalled it (previously ran dual boot, but mainly driving Linux). But if you feel like adding it, feel free to send PR.

BTW, now that we have native tray icon support in kanata, I'm thinking about deprecating and archiving this repo. I'll wait with pulling the trigger when there's also native Linux and macOS support added.

[eugenesvk]

That's fine, just FYI, on Windows I'm also using the native gui version, so don't plan to add it here, especially since I know no GO