LIBEI Yields New Effort For Emulating Input Devices In Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LIBEI Yields New Effort For Emulating Input Devices In Wayland

Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer has started writing another library to help the Linux input ecosystem: LIBEI. This new library is focused on offering emulated input device support for Wayland in order to support use-cases like xdotool for automating input events...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LIBEI-Emulated-Input-Wayland

[Vorpal]

At last! This has been one of the big showstoppers for me when it comes to switching to Wayland. Though I believe that there are still some more missing features (though it has been a while since I checked, so this may have changed):

• Programmatic moving and resizing of windows. It is much better to do this with special support (as can be done in X11), rather than simulated mouse input. The latter tends to be much more brittle and fiddly.
• Listing and querying information about windows. For example getting the sizes, position and z-order of them. Also finding the corresponding program and window class can be very useful for automation. And it is critical for automated GUI testing.
• Capturing and modifying input events, which is useful for automation. The prime example is global hotkeys or mouse buttons, and this can be integrated into the compositor to some extend. But there is so much more that can be done with a flexible protocol, such as automated replacement of certain phrases, global mouse or touch gestures etc.

[Chewi]

Michael, you should mention the FOSS Barrier fork rather than the commercialised Synergy. Barrier is very good, I use it every day for work.

[Jabberwocky]

It would be awesome if chromium could use LIBEI to provide a test case for https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium...etail?id=95874 Wouldn't want wayland-client to suffer from the same problems X11 did... tests are always useful to keep things in order!

Michael, you should mention the FOSS Barrier fork rather than the commercialised Synergy. Barrier is very good, I use it every day for work.

I advocate for open source at work and at home. I'm not in favour of advocating for this specific project.

There's no legal problems, but the ethical aspect is questionable. The correlation that I've noticed is forks like these is people being driven away from open source. I'm not telling you what you can and can't do. I'm just saying why I won't advocate it. https://www.quora.com/Has-TJ-Holoway...e-js-community

[M@yeulC]

At last! This has been one of the big showstoppers for me when it comes to switching to Wayland. Though I believe that there are still some more missing features (though it has been a while since I checked, so this may have changed):

• Programmatic moving and resizing of windows. It is much better to do this with special support (as can be done in X11), rather than simulated mouse input. The latter tends to be much more brittle and fiddly.
• Listing and querying information about windows. For example getting the sizes, position and z-order of them. Also finding the corresponding program and window class can be very useful for automation. And it is critical for automated GUI testing.
• Capturing and modifying input events, which is useful for automation. The prime example is global hotkeys or mouse buttons, and this can be integrated into the compositor to some extend. But there is so much more that can be done with a flexible protocol, such as automated replacement of certain phrases, global mouse or touch gestures etc.

I get that it isn't really portable across desktops (though most compositors have features that only make sense to them), but all except the last point are possible (and trivial) under sway, and likely possible on Mutter as well.

Capturing and modifying input events can be done trough libinput, though it requires root access, and is geared towards debugging, not really practical use, like this one is.

[vladpetric]

Interesting naming - a mix of "Li Bai" (an amazing poet) and "Liu Bei" (a statesman) :-p ?

[Chewi]

I advocate for open source at work and at home. I'm not in favour of advocating for this specific project.

There's no legal problems, but the ethical aspect is questionable.[/url]

I hear what you're saying but in this case, it was because Synergy has taken the project in a different direction with features we don't want. I have no problem paying for software and have done so many times for both open and proprietary products. I've also made build improvements to Barrier.

[d3coder]

Interesting naming - a mix of "Li Bai" (an amazing poet) and "Liu Bei" (a statesman) :-p ?

> libei is a library for Emulated Input
That's from repository and mailing list

[Vistaus]

Interesting naming - a mix of "Li Bai" (an amazing poet) and "Liu Bei" (a statesman) :-p ?

It sure is! I'm just waiting for the first Linux community member to rant about the name because it means something dirty or profane in his/her language, as always with Linux/FOSS software...

[vladpetric]

It sure is! I'm just waiting for the first Linux community member to rant about the name because it means something dirty or profane in his/her language, as always with Linux/FOSS software...

Joke aside, I highly recommend reading Li Bai's poetry in English translation (if you can read Chinese, you probably already saw his poetry ...).