How would you set the initial position of a Console App on your Screen?
It's a console app, so it has no concept of where its window is, as it doesn't know what a window is.
For Windows, you could use the GetConsoleWindow function followed by SetWindowPos with the SWP_NOSIZE and SWP_NOZORDER flags set.
I think that you're going to be more specific. With a console app, the output goes to stdout without any real control over how the console deals with it. The console deals with displaying it and normally just prints it out.
If you want more control over the console like being able to reposition the cursor or being able to erase or redraw portions of the console, then you'll likely need to look into a library like ncurses.
You can't. Put simply. If you use non-standard extensions, for example, if you made your own console via WinAPI, you might be able to make such an effect. However, within terms of just cin/cout, then you can't.
If you're in windows, then you have to set the position of the final executable. If you click the application icon and then click "Defaults" on the resulting menu, one of the options is for position.
Unfortunately, no idea how to do that on other platforms.
Related
i tried to use LINES = atoi(getenv("LINES")) in windows (visual studio 2012), but it doesn't work. Someone told me that I have to add export LINES to .bashrc or .profile. Will that solve my problem?
If it does, how to add export LINES to .bashrc or .profile?
You almost certainly want GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo to retrieve the screen buffer info (and GetStdHandle to get the console handle).
There's neither .bashrc nor .bash_profile on Windows. In order to get the current console window size, use the GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo API. Look it up. Since the window is resizable, you might want to watch that size. Use ReadConsoleInput or PeekConsoleInput to check for window resizing.
Why are you trying to get the console window dimensions, and why won't you write a proper GUI application instead?
If you are working in Visual Studio, and you just set the LINES variable, you need to first restart the IDE after setting the environment variable. Otherwise, getenv() will not return it in the processes spawned by the IDE.
In linux and when installing packages etc. There are some installers that have a progress bar and a dos window which shows the files being extracted etc. How can i add this window to my C++ Win32 programs so that i can have it showing the tasks im doing? I cannot find any documentation on MSDN.
Question: How can i add a console window (if that's what its called, sure looks like one) in my program to show the details of the task at hand being done?
Here is a window with what i am asking.. (personal info so I erased the details. :]
You cannot embed a real console window inside another window (although a windowed process can have a separate console window). While it looks like a console window / command prompt, it is just a matter of appearances. What you want to do is create a sub-window/control with similar characteristics as a console window and then redirect the console output from the application(s) being run to append to that sub-window. For more information on how to do redirect the console output in Windows, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/190351.
That "dos window" is a regular edit control: CreateWindow(ES_MULTILINE, EDIT, ...
However, it has the font set to a fixed-width one (Looks like courier). This is done by sending WM_SETFONT to the edit control.
#user995048 says "You cannot embed a real console window inside another window". But "cannot" is a strong word! I can run an entire virtualized computer in a window if I wish. :) So one can quite reasonably intuit that there are ways of doing what you say.
Sure, it is true that what you've seen are almost certainly cases of output redirection into a custom widget, designed to mimic the simple appearance of a terminal. However...if you want to embed one application's window inside another, there are things you can look into which might fit. Cooperative methods exist like GtkPlug, for instance:
http://developer.gnome.org/gtk/2.24/GtkPlug.html
To actually capture a not-designed-to-cooperate app's window and throw it in your app would be trickier. But possible, just as screen captures and virtual machines are possible. Probably best to avoid that sort of thing unless there's really a cause for it, though...
Try this
http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/article.php/c277/
link. I think the solution provided is what you need.
I tried it many years ago and it worked. I have not tried it in newer versions of windows though.
I know this type of thing is looked negatively upon but I write software for people with disabilities and sometimes good gui practices don't make sense. In this case, the user interacts with a assistive interface and under certain conditions, my control app needs to prompt the user with a question. My background process creates a dialog (I'm using wxwidgets wxDialog class) and calls Show(). The dialog box appears but it does not have focus (the application that the user was previously using keeps it). Since my users can't use mice, they can't simply click on the window. I've tried calling show and then followed by SetFocus(HWND) but that doesn't do it. What's the problem? Is this even possible? Window7. I'm thinking that it might have something to do with it being a dialog and not a full window (wxFrame). Any help is greatly appreciated.
Try using SetWindowPos(hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_NOSIZE|SWP_NOMOVE)
Unfortunately, not only is it 'looked negatively upon', but it is not possible. There's no getting around this; ask yourself what would happen if every application could do this? Obviously, if you can put your dialog on top of the other application, it can do exactly the same back to you.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/11/25/10096329.aspx
The only think I can think of would be for you to put a notification icon in the system tray, and then have it display a notification balloon.
I had to do something like this before. Simply calling functions like SetForegroundWindow or SetWindowPos didn't do the trick.
I ended up using this ForceForegroundWindow function (1st one) and it works pretty well.
I know this is Delphi code, but the API is the same and Delphi is a pretty simple language.
I want to a create dialog box like window before displaying the console window. I haven't actually tried anything yet but was just wondering if it can be displayed as a start-up window.
If you compile your win32 application as a console app, the console window will appear before you get a chance to do anything else.
To get around this, you need to use a windows application - this won't display a console window at all by default. Some time after startup you can then call AllocConsole to create a console window.
I'm not sure, but if it's a windowed application already, it might be worth making your own console window to redirect standard IO. It'll certainly look nicer. If you want the exact behavior of the regular console, such as the same copy/paste, you'd have to reimplement it.
I have a written a Visual C++ console application (i.e. subsystem:console) that prints useful diagnositic messages to the console.
However, I would like to keep the application minimized most of the time, and instead of minimizing to the taskbar, appear as a nice icon on the system tray. I would also like to restore the console when the system tray icon is clicked.
How should I change my program to do this?
This is going to be an ugly hack.
First, you have to retrieve the hWnd / hInstance of you console application. Right now, I can only come up with one way:
Create a Guid with CoCreateGuid()
Convert it to a string
Set the title of the console window to this guid with SetConsoleTitle()
Find the hWnd of the your window with the Guid as the tile with FindWindow()
And you can do it from the usual way from this point. See http://www.gidforums.com/t-9218.html for more info.
Don't forget the rename your console window to the original title once you're done.
As you can see, even though this is possible to do, it's a horrible and painful solution. Please don't do it. Please do not minimize console applications to the system tray. It is not something you are supposed to be able to do in the Windows API.
You might want to write a separate gui to function as a log reader. You will then find it much easier to make this minimize to the tray. It would also let you do some other stuff you might find useful, such as changing which level of logging messages are visible on the fly.
To learn the console's hWnd you have two choices:
On Windows 2000 or later you can use the GetConsoleWindow() function. Don't forget to define _WIN32_WINNT as 0x0500 or greater before including windows.h to have access to this function.
If you want to run your program on earlier Windows versions as well then you must use something like the GUID trick described above.
Probably your best bet is to create a "Message-only window" (a message queue without a visible window) to receive the Notification Area messages.
The answer with a GUID is completely ridiculous (no sense at all)
The Console hWnd is of course given by GetConsoleWindow() (!)