maemo.org - Talk - How To: Making your own Form Filler or Macro Typer

These are instructions for making a Form Filler (or Macro Typer or whatever you want to call it) for the Nokia Tablets.

I use Personal Menu in conjunction with xte on my N800 to accomplish this. It works like this: You can assign a string to a button in Personal Menu, and clicking the button types the character string into the target application, such as Notes or form areas in MicroB. I use it to automatically type my address, phone numbers, credit card numbers (minus, for security, a few of the digits that I've memorized), my loooong sign-on user number for the local library, email addresses I may need to input somewhere, etc.

I have fiferboy's Personal Menu set up with Menu Swap so that there are two different menus, with a button on each menu which returns you to the other menu. I keep my program icons in one menu and my Macro Typer buttons in the other. (I also keep a few duplicate program icons in the "second menu," like Notes and Calculator.)

xte is is "a program that generates fake input using the XTest extension" and takes up a mere 20 kb. I have attached it to this message as a .tar.gz file.

If you would like to have a Macro Typer like this, here's what you do.

Get Personal Menu. It's in the maemo Extras repository.

Implement multiple menus ("Menu swap") in Personal Menu.

Download the attached pathfreexte.tar.gz to your Documents folder.

Run the following code:

Code:

~$ sudo gainroot 

/home/user # cd /usr/bin/

/usr/bin # tar zxvf /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/pathfreexte.tar.gz

/usr/bin # chmod a+x xte

"Menu swap" into the "second menu" of Personal Menu, and then close Personal Menu and go to Control Panel>>Personal Menu, and add your buttons there.

To add a button, click the + sign. Say you want to have a button called "Hi" that types "hello, world". In "Name of the menu entry," type

Code:

Hi

and in "Command to execute," type

Code:

xte "str HELLO, WORLD"

xte seems to recognize only capital (upper-case) letters. It prints them as lower-case unless you tell it otherwise. If you precede the character string with 'key Shift_L' it will print the immediately following letter as a capital.

Thus, my "Command to execute" is

Code:

xte 'key Shift_L' "str SEATTLE, " 'key Shift_L' "str W" 'key Shift_L' "str A 98199"

for the Macro Typer to type

Code:

Seattle, WA 98199

That's it.

A few notes:

I had no idea how to do this and, insofar as you like it, all credit goes to fiferboy for creating Personal Menu and then its Menu Swap feature; and to Benson, who generously figured out a way for me to have a Form Filler and came up with using xte to accomplish it.

I don't know if it's illegal or unethical for me to post the xte mini-program as an attachment here. I didn't develop it in any way. xte is a component of the much-larger XAutomation, of which there is a maemo-adapted version here on bitsmithy.net, who compiled it for maemo from the XAutomation site. If anyone who better understands opensource rules than I do thinks that I'm "not supposed to be" posting xte like this, let me know and I'll take it down. (I started down this route of posting xte by itself because when I started on the project earlier today, the bitsmithy.net website was unavailable. Having xte already separated out from XAutomation also makes these instructions easier for the user.)