ydotool VS sway

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.

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I also have crashes on sway, but there’s a rough workaround now which prevents the issue totally.

I believe there’s a design issue with Firefox and GTK handling input events; some Wayland compositors have workarounds but others do not.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.

I'm seeing this: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Setting-Environmental-Variables but I haven't figured out how to make GDM do it, and I was wondering if there was a super simple "HEY SWAY READ MY .PROFILE" thing I could do.

So I searched around and found the following bug report where this problem and a possible solution was borough up: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/2966 , which was then immediately closed again.

I've been using Sway since late 2019. I like the workflow of a WM. I honestly find it hard to go back to a DE, I like having a minimalistic desktop.

Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).