Feature request: use Logkeys as an xbindkeys replacement.

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi,

 I was involved in the developement of an embedded Linux project and was using xbindkeys to link some keys to a set of scripts. Due to a complex weird bug in the X-Free implementation while interacting with an usb-2-serial device, I couldn't make it work since randomly the X came into an infinite loop.
 Fortunately I found that by slightly modifying logkeys to suit my needs I could replace xbindkeys with logkeys and the result was much better. Not only I could bypass the bug in the X system, but the setup was much easier, and now I can differentiate the events comming from two different keyboards. In my particular system this is a big plus since the system has two keyboards and I needed to make a complex setup to differentiate both inside X (activating/disabling usb-profiles depending on the system).

 I couldn't find any email address to contact the logkeys' author so I post it as a feature request to let logkeys act as a xbindkeys replacement.
 I'm sure many other development groups could be interested. From the desktop guys at Ubuntu/Fedora to all the army of developers that are targeting Android and Meego embedded devices.

P.S.: 
Hope this post arrive to someone, since I see no activity in this project since 
June 2010 (nearly 6 months ago).

Original issue reported on code.google.com by enrique....@gmail.com on 20 Dec 2010 at 10:57

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi,

Thank you for your input! Contrary to public perception, this project is very 
much alive, but only further worked on time-permitting. I'm letting features 
and bugs pile up before I swipe them all in the next development iteration. 8-)

I would be interested in your implementation and how you are grabbing events 
from two keyboards at the same time (or one at a time but without restarting 
logkeys). If you wish, you can attach relevant files here. Much obliged.

However, I'm not sure this is entirely right place for your suggestion. I 
welcome your contribution, but I have absolutely nothing to do with xbindkeys. 
Perhaps you should report this idea upstream (e.g. 
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/xbindkeys/) or to other appropriate 
group/place(s).

Thanks again. :-)

Original comment by kernc...@gmail.com on 20 Dec 2010 at 1:25

• Changed state: Done
• Added labels: Type-Other
• Removed labels: Type-Defect

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I guess I was too much brief in my previous post. The behaviour is the
same that previously, one keyboard at a time. My embeded system (an
"smart-tv") consists of two keyboards. One acts (and looks) like a
remote control like those on a TV or Video recorder. The second one
acts (and looks) like a normal keyboard. I was just interested in
trapping keys pressed from the first one, so that a user can power
on/off by pressing a key in the "remote", while the normal keyboard
continues to work as always. Since both keyboards shared the same
keycodes for some physical keys, I was forced to enable/disable one or
other depending on the context where the user was at that moment,
since there is no way in X to differentiate where the key event came
from.
Also the system had an extra dependency on X (the fewer dependencies,
the best ;) ).

I send attached the custom modified logkeys.cc. As you will see it
probably has nothing interesting at this moment, It just disables a
few thing that didn't match my purposes as a xbindkeys replacement. In
particular I allowed repeated keys to be logged as repeated keys, and
disabled the check for Ctrl+D/Ctrl+C, so that an auxiliar background
process could easely parse the generated logfile and react in a few
tens of second to each key press.

OK. Capturing keys at kernel level offers a lot of potencial for
embedded and desktop systems, not just for logging purposes so I
thought it could be an interesting feature request.

You are wellcome! Thanks to you!

Original comment by enrique....@gmail.com on 20 Dec 2010 at 5:37