How do I get a list of the window titles on the Mac OSX?

Question

I want to get the list of window titles of the currently running applications.

On windows I have EnumWndProc and GetWindowText.

On Linux I have XGetWindowPro

Answer 1

The CGSPrivate.h header that's floating around isn't directly compatible with OS X 10.8 in that CGSGetWindowProperty() no longer exists (well, it does, but you can't link to it anymore). So add these two lines to the CGSPrivate.h file -- I went ahead and figured this out myself after many hours searching Google -- to get it to work:

extern CGSConnection CGSDefaultConnectionForThread(void);
extern CGError CGSCopyWindowProperty(const CGSConnection cid, NSInteger wid, CFStringRef key, CFStringRef *output);

Adapting outis's code, here's a way of iterating through each window title. I have tested this with clang 4.2 on Mountain Lion:

CFStringRef titleValue;
CGSConnection connection = CGSDefaultConnectionForThread();
NSInteger windowCount, *windows;

NSCountWindows(&windowCount);
windows = (NSInteger*) malloc(windowCount * sizeof(NSInteger));
if (windows) {
    NSWindowList(windowCount, windows);
    for (int i = 0; i < windowCount; ++i)
    {
        CGSCopyWindowProperty(connection, windows[i], CFSTR("kCGSWindowTitle"), &titleValue);

        if(!titleValue) //Not every window has a title
            continue;

        //Do something with titleValue here
    }
    free(windows);
}

Some other stuff I found out includes the following:

1. No window title exceeds 127 bytes.
2. Window titles are encoded with kCFStringEncodingMacRoman

So, if you want it as a C-string, write something like this:

char *cTitle[127] = {0};
CFStringGetCString(titleValue,cTitle,127,kCFStringEncodingMacRoman);

Personally, I'd recommend doing it this way since the Accessibility API is a total pain and requires extra permissions.

Hope this helps someone! Cheers!