The clicker had no Linux support at all: pygetwindow has no X11 backend, so
_other_activate returned "window management is unsupported" and every step
failed before it could click. focus.py now has a third backend that raises the
browser with xdotool and reads the focused window's WM_CLASS to verify it came
forward - the same activate-then-confirm shape as the macOS and Windows paths.
setup-linux.sh mirrors setup-windows.bat with apt instead of winget. Three
things are specific to this platform rather than incidental:
- Node comes from NodeSource. Pi OS ships one too old for Next 16, and the LTS
line is also what better-sqlite3 publishes prebuilt arm64 binaries for.
- Python dependencies go in a virtualenv. Pi OS Bookworm enforces PEP 668, so
pip into the system interpreter fails with externally-managed-environment.
- Autostart uses an XDG ~/.config/autostart entry, the direct analogue of the
Windows Startup folder: no sudo, and it runs inside the graphical session,
which the clicker needs for DISPLAY.
Wayland is called out in four places - the session guard, diagnose.py, the
installer and both READMEs - because Pi OS on a Pi 5 defaults to it and the
clicker simply cannot work there. Wayland does not let one client synthesise
input into another, so this is a switch-to-X11 situation, not a bug to fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
focus.py raised the first browser in its list that happened to be running. On a
machine with both Chrome and Edge installed that is a coin flip, and losing it is
silent: coordinates measured from a tab in one browser, the click delivered into
a window of the other. It presents as selectors failing for no reason. A VPS with
both installed hit exactly this.
The extension now reports which browser is hosting it, and that travels with the
measurement, so the clicker raises the browser the coordinates actually came
from. Asking for a browser that is not running now fails honestly instead of
quietly raising a different one, and the verification step rejects the wrong
browser coming forward. Chromium, Opera and Vivaldi are recognised alongside
Chrome, Edge and Brave, on both platforms.
diagnose.py answers the question a remote desktop makes hard: whether the mouse
is really moving or the viewer simply is not drawing it. It moves the cursor and
reads the position back from the OS, so the answer does not depend on anything
being rendered, and it reports DPI mode, screen size, whether this is an RDP
session, and whether the browser can be raised at all. Nothing is clicked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
focus.py now verifies on Windows rather than assuming activation worked. Windows
declines to raise a window for a process that doesn't own the foreground — it
flashes the taskbar and the call returns as if it succeeded — so the runner reads
the foreground window's process back and reports a failure instead of clicking
into a background window. Same gap that was fixed on macOS earlier.
The runner also declares itself DPI-aware at startup. Without it Windows reports
a virtualised screen size and rescales the coordinates it accepts, while the
browser keeps reporting CSS pixels; on a display at 125% or 150% the two disagree
and clicks drift further off the further they are from the top-left.
Browser windows are matched on the owning process rather than the window title, so
an editor with chrome.js open is no longer mistaken for the browser. Linux now says
window management is unsupported there, rather than reporting no browser found —
pygetwindow has no X11 backend, and "no browser window" reads like Chrome is shut.
The main README gained a section on the AutoBuyer: what the three pieces are, how
to load the extension, and that neither the extension nor the runner reloads
itself when the source changes. That last point has been the cause of most of the
confusing failures so far, so it is called out in Updating too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Builds the pipeline the autobuyer needs: see the page, find an element,
click it.
extension/ — MV3 Chromium extension. Polls /api/autobuyer/status and,
while on, scrapes the target tab's HTML and posts it back. Also serves
locate requests: focuses the window, scrolls the element into view, and
reports its position. host_permissions is scoped to tradeify plus
localhost so it cannot read other sites — an empty target pattern would
otherwise capture whatever tab happened to be active, including banking
or mail.
app/api/autobuyer/ — status toggle, capture store, and the locate request
queue. CORS is open because the extension's origin changes every time an
unpacked extension is reloaded.
app/autobuyer/page.tsx — ON switch, source view (default) and a rendered
view. The render uses sandbox="allow-scripts" without allow-same-origin:
the page's own JS is needed because sites ship content at opacity:0 and
fade it in, but the frame must not reach the dashboard's same-origin API
routes, which serve firm credentials.
clicker/ — Python CLI. Asks the extension where a selector is, adds the
element rect to the window's screen position and the browser chrome
height to get desktop coordinates, then clicks with a human motion model
(curved path, eased velocity, occasional overshoot, dwell before press).
Raises the browser application first, since macOS consumes a click on an
unfocused window rather than delivering it.
Refuses to click when the element is covered by an overlay, when the
coordinates fall off-screen, or when the browser cannot be confirmed
frontmost.
Verified: API round-trips, capture pruning, locate claim-once semantics,
motion geometry and timing, and focus activation — the last two against
stubs, since pyautogui and pyobjc are not installed here. NOT verified
end to end: Chrome is still running a stale build of the extension, so a
locate request has never completed against a real page and no real click
has been sent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
