Programmatically find blink cursor position in windows c++?

Question

How to find out blink cursor position in windows, from c++? In many cases I need send button click on the position of the blinking cursor, but I didn't find any important function which will take care of that.

OS win 7(64), c++

Answer 1

GetGUIThreadInfo() is probably your best bet; pass it with idThread = 0 to get the info from the currently active thread, and then check the rcCaret member of the returned GUITHREADINFO structure. You'll then need to use ClientToScreen() with the hwndCaret value to convert client-relative coordinates to screen coordinates.

Note that this only works for apps that use the Win32 caret functions - specifically SetCaretPos(). If an app draws its own caret without using these, you may not get anything meaningful back. (Some apps, like Word, draw their own caret, but still call SetCaretPos so that accessibility aids that need to track the caret can use this technique.)

The rectangle you get back can sometimes be wider than the actual caret. When a bitmap is used for the caret, as is the case for Right-To-Left or Left-To-Right carets that have a little 'flag' attached to the top, you'll get back a rectangle that's a bit wider than the actual caret area, and may need to adjust or otherwise figure out where within this area the actual caret bar is - it may or may not be in the exact middle. Looks like for Notepad++ you should be fine, though.

Answer 2

It is called "caret", cursor is the mouse pointer. You use GetCaretPos() to get its position. But the returned position is relative to the client area of the window that owns the caret. Which probably means that you need to find that window first, use GetForegroundWindow() for that. And don't send button click messages, they are posted so use PostMessage().

Avoid all of this by just using SendInput().

Note that UIPI (the user interface component of UAC) prevents you from poking stuff into a window owned by an elevated process.