A few weeks ago I had an issue with a macOS system which focus kept being stolen by an unknown application. All the windows were displaying as inactive so it had to be a background process.
A StackExchange user called medmunds had adapted a script from another post, that seems to have been modified from another from some Apple forum. Isn’t the Internet great?
His script very quickly displayed the culprit. Very useful indeed.
#!/usr/bin/python
try:
from AppKit import NSWorkspace
except ImportError:
print "Can't import AppKit -- maybe you're running python from brew?"
print "Try running with Apple's /usr/bin/python instead."
exit(1)
from datetime import datetime
from time import sleep
last_active_name = None
while True:
active_app = NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace().activeApplication()
if active_app['NSApplicationName'] != last_active_name:
last_active_name = active_app['NSApplicationName']
print '%s: %s [%s]' % (
datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'),
active_app['NSApplicationName'],
active_app['NSApplicationPath']
)
sleep(1)
