inputexec VS PowerToys

I recently put something together similar to this, to switch between my personal PopOS/Windows machine and my work Macbook Pro.

I used one of these manual USB switchers, (https://sabrent.com/products/usb-sw30), and connected it's switch to a Raspberry Pi 4B via GPIO (4B is overkill by wanted hardwired network). There's a small separate keyboard (which will later be a macro keypad of some sort), connected to the Pi. Using inputexec (https://github.com/rbarrois/inputexec) to detect keypresses and then firing off a specific script to send a network request to the LG TV I use as a monitor to switch the source, and then set the GPIO connected to the USB switcher to high or low to switch the keyboard/mouse to the other machine.

I can also turn on/off the TV using the same WebOS API (and Wake-on-lan) as used during the source switch. A Kasa smart outlet also gets toggled to turn on/off a BenQ ScreenBar Halo (https://www.benq.com/en-us/lighting/monitor-light.html).

So with 4 different keypresses, I can switch to Work, to Personal, turn off monitor and light, and turn on monitor and light.

Yeah think its a ClearType issue[0] specifically then

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

It's active again, they've open sourced and reinvested in it with new utilities.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

You can download the latest version of PowerToys from the official GitHub repository. Alternatively, my brother wrote a helpful guide on how to download and install the PowerToys tool on your Windows 11 PC.

Research on Trending GitHub Repository As this is my first blog post on dev.to, so I did some research on a trending Git Hub repository, and provide insights into its usefulness and features. I chose to explore Microsoft's PowerToys repository, which has gained significant traction in the developer community.

+1 for power toys

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

also, Cygwin if you need it

Obligatory FancyZones/PowerToys links:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys?tab=readme-ov-file

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

FancyZones is a Microsoft tiling window management utility from their PowerToys collection.

> If you're on Windows you should try the powertools OCR tool.

Which is open source (MIT-licensed), the source code is here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/main/src/modules...

It is written in C#, and uses the Windows.Media.Ocr UWP API to do the actual OCR part: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?... – so if your app runs on Windows it can potentially call the same API and get OCR for free

Apple provides OCR through VisionKit ImageAnalyzer API – https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... – albeit that is only officially supported to call from Swift (although apparently you can expose it to Objective C if your write a "proxy Swift framework"–a custom Swift framework that wraps the original and adds @objc everywhere). There is also the older VNRecognizeTextRequest API which is supported by Objective C, but its OCR quality is inferior.

I'm not sure what the best answer for Linux or Android is. I guess https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract ?

Microsoft PowerToys

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo