Danie van der Merwe

ydotool is an alternative to xdotool that works on both X11 and Wayland

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:09:45 +0200

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

ydotool is an alternative to xdotool that works on both X11 and Wayland

I’m still in the process of fully migrating to Wayland from X11 on Linux, as there are still a few niggly things that don’t work 100%. At least Wayland is now stable for me on Manjaro Plasma desktop. But one challenge was getting keystrokes and mouse actions to work on Wayland, as all my shortcut keys on my Stream Deck are set up using the great xdotool which does all that, as well as window functions.

So ydotool does do the keystrokes and mouse actions quite well (using the identical syntax on Wayland and X11) but there are some caveats unfortunately:
* It does not do any window functions like resize, move, bring into focus, or therefore, directing actions straight into a background window. And worse, even wmctrl misses some windows on Wayland – it recognised the Zoom Meeting window but not Kdenlive, but I need to test it out more thoroughly.
* It has an unintuitive syntax as everything is keycodes such as 28:1 to press and 28:0 to release instead of xdotool’s alt+g for example.
* The instructions to install are “messy” with it installing as a user service when it should be a systemwide service. It may be that the documentation is a bit out of sync.

Rest of the post at ydotool is an alternative to xdotool that works on both X11 and Wayland

I'm still in the process of fully migrating to Wayland from X11 on Linux, as there are still a few niggly things that don't work 100%. At least Wayland is now stable for me on Manjaro Plasma desktop. But one challenge was getting keystrokes and mouse actions to work on Wayland, as all my shortcut...

#technology #Linux #opensource #Wayland

technology Linux opensource Wayland xdotool

The xdotool command on Linux can automate just about any keystroke or mouse actions from the command line, or for shortcut keys

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 19:24:14 +0200

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I'm busy looking into xdotool to automate various actions on Linux with the Elgato Stream Deck (well because Elgato only provides apps for Windows and MacOS). There is a good Linux alternative app to work with the Stream Deck, but I do need to be able to execute some commands when I want to bring a specific window into focus from the background, and then to execute a key press shortcut. So an example may be to bring Brave Beta browser window into focus, then activate tab 3 and do a tab fresh.

Another tip I worked out is instead of struggling to identify which window has which name exactly, you can also right-click on a window's title bar and choose to rename the window. When I restarted that application, it retained the window name.

So, to bring Brave Beta browser into focus, activate tab 2 (CTRL-2), and then do a fresh (CTRL-R), I can just set this command string to a hot key on the Stream Deck: 'xdotool search --name 'Brave-Beta' windowactivate --sync key ctrl+2 ctrl+r'.

You can still do this sort of thing without having any Stream Deck by just setting the same string to any Linux shortcut on the keyboard.

Xdotool lets you simulate keyboard input and mouse activity, move and resize windows, etc. It does this using X11’s XTEST extension and other Xlib functions. With xdotool, you can search for windows and move, resize, hide, and modify window properties like the title. If your window manager supports it, you can use xdotool to switch desktops, move windows between desktops, and change the number of desktops.

See GitHub - jordansissel/xdotool: fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more

#technology #opensource #Linux #automation #xdotool

fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more - GitHub - jordansissel/xdotool: fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more

technology Linux opensource xdotool automation