Keystroke Spacebar ??

Question

Level 1

9 points

Keystroke Spacebar ??

Happy New year to all!

I'm trying to get the keystroke for the spacebar to work, however (as a newbie to AS) I think I may have two issues to deal with:

1. I'm not sure what the "keystroke" for the spacebar is, to insert it into my script.

2. The window of the application I'm trying to run from the script, does not start as the frontmost window when the app opens via the script!

So ideally, once I know the keystroke, I'm still going to need to bring the app to the frontmost window, script the keystoke for the Spacebar to start the application, then make the main app to frontmost window again.

Any help would be most gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.

Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Jan 1, 2011 4:49 PM

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Answer 1

red_menace

Level 6

17,066 points

Jan 1, 2011 5:29 PM in response to willoghby

You can use the reserved word space, for example

keystroke space

To bring an application to the front, you can usually just tell it to activate. For example, running the following script from the *Script Editor* with a Finder window opened in the background will bring the window to the front and do a QuickLook (assuming you haven't changed the keyboard preference)

<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFCE75;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Finder"
activate
tell application "System Events"
keystroke space
end tell
end tell
</pre>

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Answer 2

willoghby Author

Level 1

9 points

Jan 1, 2011 9:42 PM in response to red_menace

Thanks Red_Menace,

I knew it would be something pretty simple . . . I substituted the "Finder" for the application I'm trying to open . . . and hey presto!

Works great!

Now to insert it into my script and see if it works with everything else!

Thanks, appreciate your help!

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