Re: [Vala] Getting/sending sequence of keyboard keys to/from active application

[Arkadi Viner <arkashkin gmail com>]

Thank you very much for the information.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Jan Hudec <bulb ucw cz> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:29:02 +0300, Arkadi Viner wrote:
> > Hello.
> > I want to write a program which should record pressed sequences of keys
> and
> > if it receives some shortcut key it will
> > send delete key to erase wrong typed content, then it will convert from
> one
> > language characters to an another (according to some translation map) and
> > then send them again to the active application.
> > It will help people who forgets to switch typing language when they
> type...
> > Maybe some one knows what I should look for? How to hook to an active
> > application event listener or some how communicate
> > directly with the X server?
>
> Both XCB and X11 libraries have bindings for vala, but I don't think either
> of them is complete. See xcb.vapi and x11.vapi respectively. It might be
> even
> possible to use gdk (gdk-x11 is bound) for the even handling itself, but
> you
> will still need to find the windows with x11 (gdk-x11-2.0 depends on x11)
> and
> it's many extra dependencies if you didn't need your own gui.
>
> For the event handling itself, I believe X allows you to listen to events
> on
> any window on the display, independently of whether you created it, so if
> you
> find the window, you can simply register the events.
>
> Just be warned, that X sends keyboard events to the window under mouse and
> modern gui libraries go to some length to get the events where they really
> want them. It used to make life easier at times of athena widgets (which
> simply didn't bother and used that semantics), but now it makes it harder
> if
> one wants to keep separate keyboard focus.
>
> --
>                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <
> bulb ucw cz>