Trigger scripts instead of Keys

[magdesign]

Working on a custom layout where i add a button for speech-to-text input and a button to enable touchpad simulation (to show a mouse pointer) for pmos, sxmo, linuxmobile.

but i am not quite sure how i could define to trigger an action/script instead of a keypress. any hints are very welcome 😘

(i promise to document it here)

[proycon]

There currently isn't a way to trigger scripts directly. A workaround is to trigger a key-combo and have the compositor/window manager tie it to a script. If we want wvkbd to directly launch scripts, which sounds like a fair use case, then we could add a variant 'Script' to the key_type enum, and tie the code field (uint32_t) to represent the index in a (new) array of strings that defines the shell commands to be invoked. How does that sound?

[magdesign]

thanks for this detailed replay !
i started solving it with key combos (see link above)... and will later dig into your second solution (when i can use a bigger screen somewhere 😅) .

[magdesign]

there are so many keycombos used in the system and i am struggling making long combos like:
{"󰍬", "󰍬", 1.0, Code, KEY_P, Shift, AltGr, KEY_DOT},

this will just type a 0

or:
{"󰍬", "󰍬", 1.0, Code, Mod, Ctrl, Shift, KEY_DOT}

will just type a ! instead of simulating the full combo

so keycombos are not really a safe way to go....

[proycon]

Sorry, I may have set you on the wrong foot by saying "key combo", you can't currently configure a single key to output an actual sequence of keys. Code emits a single keycode with optionally a forced modifier (ctrl, altgr, shift, etc). So the 'key combo' is limited to such simple combinations. This for instance will emit super+p (you can't add extra fields like you did above):

{"󰍬", "󰍬", 1.0, Code, KEY_P, 0, Super},
                                ^---- code_mod    
                      ^------ code

[proycon]

If you want multiple modifiers, I think you can add them together with bitwise OR: Super | AltGr

[magdesign]

i've just overwritten some regular keybindings for now, but will try your idea.

btw.
if there ever will be a script implementation, it would also be nice to have some kind of pressed/released trigger. so we could run a script when pressed and when released it would stop or run a kill script..