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.

The LIBEI library is working to support emulated input use-cases on Wayland to offer functionality akin to X11's xdotool automation software or the Synergy software for sharing keyboard/mouse setups between systems. LIBEI consists of a client library for applications and then a server-side library (LIBEIS) for the Wayland compositor integration. These two libraries communicate with each other for negotiating the emulated input events.

The communication between the client and server libraries for LIBEI is left as an implementation detail and is not utilizing the Wayland protocol. This separate channel for communication is seeing work done on supporting multiple back-ends, including use-cases like support within Flatpak portals.

LIBEI is still in the early stages of development but those wishing to learn more about this effort can see this mailing list post by Peter Hutterer outlining the concepts and early work.