On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 11:27:50PM +0000, Zarif Atai wrote: > Dear subscribers of wayland-devel, > > As a Vim motions enthusiast, it bothers me that there are too many situations > where I'm forced to use a pointer input device (e.g. a mouse) to perform an > action. I looked around to see if anyone has developed a tool that would > allow me to move or teleport the pointer to a specific location on the screen > and perform a click action using keyboard keystrokes. I did not find it, so I > decided to create it myself. I have recently started to learn the programming > language Rust. I thought this would be a great opportunity to improve my Rust > skills, too. > > As someone new to both Wayland and Rust, I dove into the Wayland > documentation and related Rust crates. Thus far, I have not found any > documentation on how to send synthetic input (i.e. mouse movements) to the > display server as a Wayland client. According to some LLMs, synthetic input > is even heavily restricted in Wayland due to security reasons, making my > quest to create this tool impossible. > > I would like to ask for your input (no pun intended) on this. Is it true what > the LLMs are saying? If so, are there alternative ways to develop such a tool?
While not strictly Wayland, you can inject synthetic input via libei using the remote desktop portal. It does so with sandboxing/security in mind, by being a portal. See https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop.html for details. Whether it works on your compositor depends on the portal backend used. Some compositors may support the virtual keyboard or virtual pointer protocols as well. See https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-virtual-pointer-unstable-v1 and https://wayland.app/protocols/virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1. Jonas > > I'm looking forward to your responses. > > Sincerely, > Zarif Atai
