Hello,

I'm new to using pywinauto for some automation. I'm in the process of making a program that can automate on Pokemon Heartgold by using DesMuME. Initially, I was using pyautogui to automate the keystrokes and it was working perfectly. However, pyautogui needs the window to be in focus, which makes it so that I cannot use my computer to do other things in the meantime. This is when I started looking into pywinauto, to try and send keys to the program in the background while I do other things.

The issue is that none of the keystrokes are being sent. I'm still very new to pywinauto, and I might be doing things incorrectly, but I am not entirely sure. I've tried methods like type_keys(), send_chars() and send_keystrokes() but I was getting errors on each of them. I tried importing the send_keys() method from pywinauto.keyboard, but it doesn't work.

This is the code I have so far to initialize the application:

from pywinauto import Application
from pywinauto.keyboard import send_keys
import pywinauto
import time

app = Application(backend='uia').connect(title_re='DeSmuME')
desmume = app.window(title_re='DeSmuME')

# Even trying to send keystrokes while the window is focused, no luck
# desmume.set_focus()

# attempts at sending keys:
desmume.type_keys('{UP}')
desmume.send_chars('{UP}') # Error 
desmume.send_keystrokes('{UP}') # Error
send_keys('{UP}')

I don't really know what else there is to try. The pyautogui solution works as it should, but this would make it so much easier to run the program and leave it in the background while I do other things. If anyone knows how to fix, I would greatly appreciate it.

Tried this code:

import win32gui
import win32con

windowID = win32gui.FindWindow(None, "testing.pdf - Adobe Acrobat Pro DC")
#win32gui.SetForegroundWindow(windowID)
win32gui.SendMessage(windowID, win32con.WM_KEYDOWN, win32con.VK_NEXT, 0) #VK_NEXT is Page Down button

Above code works only if i de-comment the SetForegroundWindow line. Why won't it work without it? :(

I wish to keep the terminal in focus while my script does tasks on a window in the background. (mainly sending differenbt keystrokes like ctrl+Tab, pgDn/pgUp, etc)