qazbnm456 / electron-panel-window

Enables creating a browser window in Electron that behaves like an NSPanel.

electron-panel-window

Enables creating a browser window in Electron that behaves like a Panel. Panels are typically used for auxillary windows and do not activate the application – as such they can appear ontop of other apps in the same way as Spotlight or 1Password, for example.

Usage

Use PanelWindow as you would BrowserWindow. All of the methods exposed in this module must be used on the main process. Using the methods in a renderer process will result in your app crashing.

import { PanelWindow } from 'electron-panel-window';

const win = new PanelWindow({
  width: 800,
  height: 600,
  show: false,
});

// the window will show without activating the application
win.show();

You can also access the utility methods directly:

import { remote } from 'electron';
import { makePanel, makeKeyWindow } from 'electron-panel-window';

const currentWindow = remote.getCurrentWindow();

// convert the window to an NSPanel
makePanel(currentWindow);

// focus the window without activating the application
makeKeyWindow(currentWindow);

Development

To compile the extension for the first time, run

$ yarn
$ yarn install

All subsequent builds only need yarn build. Tests run in Spectron:

$ yarn test

Debugging steps

1. After bumping into an error, you're supposed to see something like:

   0   com.github.Electron.framework 	0x000000010a0c976f 0x107e9e000 + 35829615
   

2. Download dSYM from https://github.com/electron/electron/releases, launch atos like: xcrun atos -o "Electron Framework.dSYM/Contents/Resources/DWARF/Electron Framework" -l 0x10a620000 -arch x86_64, and type 0x000000010c84b76f
3. You should see the line triggering the error:

   -[AtomNSWindowDelegate windowWillClose:] (in Electron Framework) (atom_ns_window_delegate.mm:248)
   

Contributing

This project is built on top of Abstract's work.

Details

File	Contents
NativeExtension.cc	Represents the top level of the module. C++ constructs that are exposed to javascript are exported here
functions.cc	The meat of the extension
index.js	The main entry point for the node dependency
binding.gyp	Describes the node native extension to the build system (node-gyp). If you add source files to the project, you should also add them to the binding file.

License

This project is under MIT. See LICENSE