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Peter
Peter

Reputation: 7334

How to send a key press event to X for a key that isn't on the keyboard?

I'd like to send a synthetic keypress event to X. This all seems to work fine for most keys using XSendEvent to send a KeyPress event. Unfortunately I can't get it to work for a key that isn't actually on my keyboard - in this case the sterling sign £ (I have a US keyboard).

The problem seems to be that the XKeyEvent structure needs a keycode and I only have a KeySym for this sign. XKeysymToKeycode returns 0 because there isn't a key for it.

Does anyone know how I can achieve this? It may be that I need some rather different approach here - any advice is appreciated!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2316

Answers (2)

Rob Bradford
Rob Bradford

Reputation: 1460

@Peter you're looking along the right lines. Part of the challenge is that the set of KeySyms is much larger than the size of keycode. You can resolve this by modifying the keymap just before synthesising the event.

Take a look at libfakekey: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/libfakekey/tree/src/libfakekey.c

And in particular: fakekey_press_keysym function which takes a KeySym to send rather than just a code.

Upvotes: 2

Lars Kotthoff
Lars Kotthoff

Reputation: 109262

Have a look at xdotool.

Upvotes: 2

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