Re: sending keystroke to unfocused window

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:59:01 +0000 (UTC)
Tuomo Valkonen <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2007-04-10, Tuomo Valkonen <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 2007-04-10, Stefan Reichör <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> You can use xautomation to send keystrokes.
> >
> > Ah, such a program exists. Now I can just point everyone asking to
> > include all sorts of fancy key forwarding to stuff in Ion, to it.
> 
> Actually... xautomation doesn't work. You can't send keys to a
> particular windows with it. It uses XTest, so X will normally
> forward grabbed keys to the grabbing application.

For what I know, sending artificial events is not satisfactorily doable
under X11. There's XSendEvent, which sends events that are flagged
artificial. They are not equivalent to true events, since some apps
(most notoriously XTerm) refuse to accept them for some dubious
"security concerns." On the other hand, there's XTest which is not
ubiquitous and which has limitations such as the one mentioned above.

I don't know of any other means of achieving something similar. Tools
like xautomation thus can only be ugly, crooked and way too short
kludges.

Denis