A useful library for automating Windows and software interface GUIs is Microsoft UI Automation (UIA). pywinauto makes UI automation available as a library from the Python language, allowing similar Windows automation.
Github:
pywinauto/pywinauto: Windows GUI Automation with Python (based on text properties)
Documentation:
What is pywinauto — pywinauto 0.6.8 documentation
When it comes to Windows automation, autohotkey comes to mind, but Autohotkey is mainly for keyboard and mouse automation, or adding hotkeys/shortcut keys, and is not suitable for detailed automation processing of launched .NET framework-based software or graphical user interfaces.
For other cases, if you’re automating Excel, VBA is used, and for automating browsers/web pages like Chrome or Firefox, libraries like selenium, puppeteer, or playwright are suitable.
Installation
If python is not yet installed, use chocolatey to install python.
choco list --localonly
choco install python --version=3.6.7An overview of what chocolatey is and how to install it is introduced below.
Installing chocolatey on Windows 11
Install virtualenv. Then create a virtual environment with virtualenv.
C:\Python36\python.exe -m pip install virtualenv
C:\Python36\python.exe -m virtualenv venv3.6Enter the virtualenv virtual environment and install the pywinauto library.
. .\venv3.6\Scripts\activate
pip install -U pywinautoRunning pywinauto
Sample code for pywinauto looks like this: When you run the following python script, notepad.exe (Notepad) will open, and the help page and about page will automatically open from the menu.
Note that the code below assumes the Windows system language is English, so if it’s a Japanese system, you may need to change “Help->About Notepad” or similar.
from pywinauto.application import Application
app = Application().start("notepad.exe")
app.UntitledNotepad.menu_select("Help->About Notepad")
app.AboutNotepad.OK.click()
app.UntitledNotepad.Edit.type_keys("pywinauto Works!", with_spaces = True)Errors
Below is how to deal with errors that occur.
The following error may occur during pywinauto execution:
_argtypes_ passes a union by value, which is unsupportedThe cause appears to be when the python version is 3.8 or higher.
As a solution, downgrade the python version to 3.7.4 or lower.
In the installation above, we specified version 3.6.7 for python installation with choco install python —version=3.6.7. It seems to work at least with 3.6.7.
downgrade python to 3.7.4Reference pages: