💾 Archived View for heavysquare.com › notes › FFF7-xdotool-key-to-wm-trigger.txt captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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~~ 2020-12-27T14:54:43+01:00 I wrote myself a launcher system that helps me launching applications big time. Recently I extended this system with it sending keys to my window manager, dwm, via `xdotool key`. Nice and easy. The launcher works in a way so that it reacts to keys directly, so you don't have to press the Enter key at the end. Tech details are
stty -icanon -echo && c=$(dd bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null) && stty icanon echo
I had an action which worked fine, it opened or made an already opened instance visible of an application. I changed the application name and it's not working. It was really weird. Even, it was the same application, but different arguments. I spent like 15 minutes to study how that different argument could interfere with the system. It seemed that the last `xdotool key` call was not going through for some reason. Hmm. Trigger key for the first/old action was o, so the last step of interacting with the launcher was pressing the o key. And then the magic happened. For the second/newer action, which was not working, the last step was pressing S. Capital s. The wm line in these launch scripts were: `xdotool key alt+u` It turns out that when you trigger the second launcher with S, you press shift, hold it down, press s, 1. then the launcher starts it's action immediately 2. does everything, even running `xdotool key alt+u` 3. but by that time, you're likely to still hold shift, so the wm gets an alt+shift+u instead of the intended alt+u 4. that combination, alt+shift+u was not mapped to anything, so it looked like nothing had happened QED