self-driving-desktop VS ydotool

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/self-driving-desktop

cross platform self-driving mouse & keyboard, can also record

There is https://github.com/hofstadter-io/self-driving-desktop that enables you to "drive" the mouse and keyboard across applications. I originally built this for automating recordings. It even has a recording feature itself, so you can go through the demo by hand and then cleanup the steps afterwards.

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.