When creating some recipes, you may need to find a specific window to operate on it. This how-to explains how.

Many of the commands available for use in recipes accept a

There are three pieces of information available for determining if a window is the window you are looking for: process name, window class and window title.

• A process is a single instance of a program. The process name is the name of the executable (e.g. the .exe file) without the .exe extension.

• A window has a title and a class. The window title is the part you can see in the title bar of the window. The window class is a value that is normally hidden from everyone but programmers, but is a value that would typically be shared across multiple windows from the same program. The developer of the program decides what the window class is.

In most cases it makes sense to compose your recipes relying on the process name and window title, and ignoring the window class. There are specific cases where the window class is required.

Searching for windows

When you want to locate a window, you can provide a search string for each of these 3 properties. In the user interface, for the move window command, it looks like this:

The user interface does a good job of separating the 3 parts you are searching for, so you can learn what exactly is matched. In this case, we've chosen to both limit matched windows to any Notepad processes, and any window that ends in - Notepad (which is a pattern all Notepad windows follow in English versions of Windows). The * character is a wildcard, meaning it will match anything.

This query is quite broad, in that it finds all currently open Notepad windows, and in some cases you may want that. However, you may also want to be more strict and e.g. use mylogfile.txt - Notepad as the window title.

From the command line

If you were to invoke the previous command from the command line, MaxTo has its own query format for window queries, as we call them. Here is an overview of the syntax where all the parts have been specified:

\MSPaint\MSPaintApp\* - Paint

Notice that you can look at this as a path into a strange filesystem, where the folders are organized hierarchically by process name, window class and then window title.

Wildcards and regular expressions

MaxTo supports both wildcards and regular expressions when dealing with window queries. In most cases you will want to stick to using wildcards, as they are easier to read. However, regular expressions provide some specificity, in that you can exclude windows based on stricter patterns.

We'll use Visual Studio Code as an example. As I am editing the file for the contents of this page, its title bar reads:

So if I wanted to find a Visual Studio Code window that was not using a remote environment, it would be impossible to do using simply wildcards. It is possible to find windows that are using remote environments, that would look like this:

\VSCode\\* - * [*] - Visual Studio Code

If you wanted to find windows not using a remote environment, the regular expression we need to use is

This regular expression is quite complex, and while we consider teaching regular expressions to be outside of the scope of MaxTo's manual, here is a quick overview of what this regular expression does:

• The

  ^ and
  $ at the start and end of the expression ensures that the expression matches the entire window title.

• (• )? matches both if there are saved and unsaved changes.

• (.+?) matches the file name.

• ([^[]+?) matches the project name, but excludes anything in brackets (the remote environment).