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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T07:48:44+00:00

I’ve been playing around trying to create a transparent window that will overlay another

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I’ve been playing around trying to create a transparent window that will overlay another application. I’m finding the win32 extensions are a bit of a mess, there’s win32ui, win32gui, winxpgui, etc. somewhat confusing.

Anyway, I’m trying to pass a handle to a window to this function win32gui.UpdateLayeredWindow

the first argument it wants is a handle, as a pyhandle type.

all the methods to find a handle of a window, all return an int, and not the pyhandle type. even the ones from the same modules. win32gui.findwindow(None, “windowtitle”) finds and returns the handle for the window i want, but only in int form and not as a PyHandle.

here’s the docs for the object.
http://docs.activestate.com/activepython/2.5/pywin32/PyHANDLE.html

here’s the docs for the findwindow method.
docs.activestate.com/activepython/2.5/pywin32/win32gui__FindWindow_meth.html

and here’s the docs for the method that will not accept int.
docs.activestate.com/activepython/2.5/pywin32/win32gui__UpdateLayeredWindow_meth.html

I’ve even tried using WX to create and find handles for windows, it also only returns int.

there’s another function that wants a handle, written by the same people, and it accepts int as a handle. win32api.SetWindowLong

Question is, is there some way to create a PyHANDLE object from the int i receive? I can’t figure it out.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As the docs for PyHANDLE say, “Most functions which accept a handle object also accept an integer”. Have you tried passing UpdateLayeredWindow the integer?

    Basically, a PyHANDLE is just a thin wrapper around an integer, with the extra property that when the PyHANDLE object goes away win32api.CloseHandle will be called on it.

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