Clicking an applications menu bar item with AppleScript

Question

I use Time Tracker For Mac as my, well, time tracker. It has a menu bar item which I want to be able to access via keyboard shortcut.

I found a way to click the item with GUI scripting:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Time Tracker"
    click menu bar item of menu bar 2
end tell

Unfortunately the script does not return success unless I acted on the menu (i.e. pressing Enter or Esc key). So if I want to trigger the down arrow key...

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Time Tracker"
    click menu bar item of menu bar 2
    -- hangs here forever until menu is closed
    tell application "System Events" to key code 124
end tell

the script just waits forever. If I hit escape the menu bar item closes and only then the down arrow key will be triggered.

It's kind weird. I just need the menu bar item's click to not block further script execution.

Any suggestions?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

2

The click command returns after about 5 seconds for me. One workaround is to use ignoring application responses and terminate System Events:

ignoring application responses
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "Time Tracker"
        click menu bar item 1 of menu bar 2
    end tell
end ignoring
do shell script "killall System\\ Events"
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Time Tracker"
    tell menu bar item 1 of menu bar 2
        click menu item 2 of menu 1
    end tell
end tell

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edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

Community

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answered May 21 '13 at 16:55

Lri

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Thanks a lot. This works indeed. I'm not very comfortable to entirely kill the process, but I will try this for a while. – LeEnno May 22 '13 at 09:12
1

According to [Daemons and Services Programming Guide](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/Lifecycle.html), loginwindow sends TERM or KILL signals to background processes and daemons at logout. System Events supports sudden termination, so it should be safe to even send it a KILL signal. – Lri May 22 '13 at 14:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 21 '13 at 15:36

Actually, the key code for the down arrow seems to be 125. Try this:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Time Tracker"
    click menu bar item of menu bar 2
    key code 125
    key code 36
end tell

There is a short delay (a couple of seconds) after the click menu bar... command, I don't know why.

Clicking an applications menu bar item with AppleScript

2 Answers2

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