NaturalEdgePan VS ydotool

AutoIt is also great especially for quickly prototyping GUIs.

I recently built a proof-of-concept for a modernized method of interacting with RTS cameras[0], which unfortunately could not be achieved with frameworks like SDL due to their abstraction obscuring some of the native OS functions needed to create my idea.

Using AutoIt lets me basically just treat it as a minimal-boilerplate sandbox to make DllCalls. This also means that I could directly listen as well as post raw device messages. For example, I implemented an inertia-based cursor script that basically lets you use your homerow vim keys like it's a trackball[1], which I now use everyday whenever I'm not with my ThinkPad.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/NaturalEdgePan

I came across this very interesting bit of history while looking for an image to illustrate my RTS camera control concept[0] as an analogy.

It's interesting how a lot of the wartime "computational drudgery" frequently employ women, the perception of which shifted to becoming a more men-dominated employment after the war.

It would be lovely to hear interesting perspectives from people here on what other tidbits you know of about little-known roles and the social climate during the war, or your insights on how things came to be the way they are during and after the war.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/NaturalEdgePan#figure-2-this-w...

So I made this prototype, to show how I think new-players can be encouraged to use unlocked camera more effectively -- I think the main friction is less about traditional edge-panning being inefficient, and more about it being accident-prone: players acquiring mouse precision at the same time as learning the game finds themselve accidentally panning the camera when the cursor is close to the edge, so early on they develop a bad habit of leaving a wide space for where you are clicking rather than developing the motor control to kite with the cursor close to the screen-edge and hero.

A playable demo downloadable from GitHub

You can feel it out in the playable demo here!

NaturalEdgePan

Wayland provides little by design, so this is quite typical. For example:

Screensharing is handled by pipewire [0], changing keyboard layouts aren't defined [1] by wayland, and generally anything Wayland devs think would 'corrupt' their protocol.

They leave most things to the compositor to implement, which leads to significant fragmentation as every compositor implements it differently.

Long gone are the days of xset and xdotool working across nearly every distro due to a common base, now the best you'll get is running a daemon as root to directly access `/dev/uinput` [2] or implementing each compositors accessibility settings (if they have them) as a workaround.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/1221333/screensharing-under-...

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/292868/how-to-custo...

[2] https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

I personally use libinput-gestures to call commands using touchpad gestures. You can also combine it with ydotool to bind macros and such to your gestures, e.g. 4 fingers swipe down closes the current window, 3 fingers swipe left or right changes workspace, etc

Have you tried using the systemd unit file supplied with ydotool? It's probably installed somewhere on your system. Else you can get it here and just change the install location of ydotoold.

For simulated keyboard there are tools such as dotool or ydotool and KeePass extensions such as KPUInput that work by giving the user access to /dev/uinput. That works, but it's a bit inelegant; I guess in the future a Wayland protocol for simulated keyboard input will emerge, like wlroots already has, also for virtual pointers.

ydotool is the generic equivalent. It works on both X11 and Wayland environments.

Autokey does not work yet, but there is Hawck and Espanso that you could play around with. And there is ydotool if all you need is simulating basic input (as in ydotool mousemove -x -10 -y -10, ydotool type 'Hello world!' and so on).

Does ydotool do what you need? I haven't even tried Wayland in years. I'm sure someday I'll find the need.