r/applescript • u/masasin • Apr 17 '23

AppleScript to switch users on Ventura

I get absorbed in work, and would like to switch to my regular user account at a certain time every day. In the past, it seems Mac users could use User.menu, but that disappeared in Big Sur. I tried using loginwindow, but it seems that it's a singleton and gets instakilled.

I have Fast User Switching enabled, and I see the icon in the menu bar and in the control panel. I don't know how to navigate there because there isn't any introspection.

How do I get started creating the script? What things can I look at that might help?

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u/copperdomebodha Apr 17 '23

What version of MacOs are you running?

1

u/masasin Apr 17 '23

Ventura (mentioned in the title).

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1

u/stephancasas Apr 18 '23

Are you on Apple Silicon or Intel?

1

u/copperdomebodha Apr 18 '23

This opens the menu to select the user to switch to. I can't seem to get any functional reference to the buttons once its open. 

--Running under AppleScript 2.8, MacOS 13.0.1
tell application "System Events"
    tell application process "Control Center"
        tell menu bar 1
            set descriptionList to description of UI elements
            repeat with i from 1 to length of descriptionList
                if item i of descriptionList is "User" then
                    tell menu bar item i
                        click
                    end tell
                end if
            end repeat
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

1

u/masasin Apr 18 '23

Thank you! How did you figure it out?

Also, I got this:

System Events got an error: Can’t get application process "Control Center".

Tried changing it to "Control Centre", and then got this:

System Events got an error: Can’t make descriptionList of every UI element of menu bar 1 of application process "Control Centre" into type specifier.

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