Determining active program from AppleScript

[Mat Schaffer]

Hello all,

I wrote a vim/iTerm2 helper script that lets me use iTerm 2 in place of screen or tmux to interact with a REPL or shell or whatever: https://github.com/matschaffer/vim-islime2

But I'd be especially happy if there were a way for certain actions to verify that they're sending input to the right program (bash for example) rather than something I accidentally left open on the other panel (e.g., less). Does anyone know if there's an AppleScript or other solution I could use to find out what is the active process in a panel?

I think this may also be useful for another goal I have: mapping Cmd+c to "*y if vim is the active process (and paste too of course)

Thanks for all the hard work on iTerm2 so far. Undoubtedly the most capable terminal emulator I've ever seen!

-Mat

[George Nachman]

This could be a possible use of scripting in a future iTerm2 that has scripting built in. At the moment we do figure out the process name to display in the title bar but it's not exposed.

[Mat Schaffer]

Guess I'll keep my fingers crossed in the mean time ;)

[Jeremy Volkman]

Well hello there. 

-Jeremy

[Tom Feist]

If you don't mind cheating a bit, it's possible with the current Applescript capapbilities as well.
The trick is to use AS to get the name of the pty used by each open window/tab, and then read/parse
the output of 'ps' to match up programs with controlling ttys.

http://pastie.org/3559094 has a quick & dirty python script I knocked together to demonstrate it, using
the 'appscript' scripting bridge, because I really *really* hate writing applescript. You could probably
translate it pretty easily though, it's something like:

tell app "iTerm"
get tty of every session of every terminal
-- save it somewhere/do something with it.
end tell

The bit I didn't immediately find an answer to was which of the programs running on a given tty is the active/foreground
one? Basic logic suggests it should be the most recent/one with the highest PID, but if you C-z that and switch back to another,
it could get confused. There might be some other way to do it that I'm not aware of.

A less/more hacky approach would be to use/emulate a preexec style hook for your shell, which writes to a file in /tmp or whatever
the name of the thing you're about to execute. The postexec/prompt_command hook then removes the flle.

zsh has support for preexec functions built in, and there's http://www.twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph/preexec.bash.txt for bash
which emulates it via debug traps.

Hope some of this helps,

Tom.

[Mat Schaffer]

This all sounds very promising, Tom. I'll post an update once I get a chance to hack on this a bit more.

And thanks!

Mat