ydotool VS evsieve

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.

Same with evsieve: I can see the keys I press, like in wev, but the remap doesn't work for the keyboard or the mouse:

My best suggestion for you is to leverage evsieve: https://github.com/KarsMulder/evsieve

There are many other software tools such as https://github.com/jtroo/kanata and https://github.com/KarsMulder/evsieve. The main difference with 𝑥MK is that you can use native QMK and ZMK.

Ironically I know you can do this in i3 and xorg/gnome using xmodmap or editing the xkb file. I'm pretty sure wayland compositors should be able to read xkb-compliant files but the recommended way of loading that in is probabaly different between various compositors? You could also use a "second generation" interception tool that works at the event device level.

You might want to try evsieve, it even has an example about toggling devices and it concludes with a hint on how to get this to work for 2 VMs.

Evsieve is amazing in general you sould check it out 🙂

evsieve has solved that for me, as the virtual device created is always available; it starts when I log on my computer and stay open forever.

evsieve can remap. I haven't used it yet but you can find it here: https://github.com/KarsMulder/evsieve

If this feels a bit limited (you have a few predefined options), there's also evsieve. Which allows you to do a lot more (like selective key pass-through, shortcuts, etc.).