Typemute

typemute is a tool that mutes all your unmuted microphones while you type. Your conference call fellows will thank you for it!

It currently only supports PulseAudio as an audio backend.

Usage

Just call typemute (or ./typemute if only locally installed) in your terminal.

It will ask you for your sudo-password (see FAQ) for obtaining keypresses and will start working.

How to get it

Arch

Install from AUR.

Debian

Install the packages libinput-tools, expect (for unbuffer) and sudo, then proceed to "build from source".

Build from source

Install external dependencies:

• pacmd
• libinput (the tool, not just the library)
• unbuffer (likely from the expect package)
• sudo

Then either

go get -u github.com/cherti/typemute

or clone and

go get -u github.com/sqp/pulseaudio  # get the dependency
go build typemute.go  # and build locally

FAQ

Why does it need sudo/root privileges?

Superuser privileges are required for libinput to read keypresses from devices in /dev/input/*. This could theoretically be avoided by adjusting permissions, however, being allowed to read from there as a user means every software can log every keystroke, which is highly undesirable. Therefore typemute simply requires elevated privileges for monitoring keystrokes (and only for that, typemute itself runs with user privileges only).