Extension protocols to support keyboard and mouse sharing?

[Jonas Ådahl]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 01:47:47PM -0500, Matt Hoosier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For a while now, I’ve been hoping to see some commercial solutions like
> https://symless.com/synergy that implement keyboard and mouse sharing
> finally add support for running on DEs that use Wayland.
> 
> It seems to be forever on their feature roadmaps but never really getting
> closer.
> 
> I assume the problem is lack of a good way to snoop on the input events and
> (maybe; not sure how these commercial solutions implement it) rewrite or
> suppress certain input events when they’re talking to a typical DE
> compositor like Mutter.
> 
> I had a quick look through the current set of things in wayland-protocols,
> and nothing jumped out at me as work in that direction.
> 
> Does anybody know of something underway in the upstream compositors that
> might not have filtered down to wayland-protocols yet, which would be
> useful for securely implementing mouse/keyboard sharing across separate
> machines? Maybe I could point these vendors to it.

There is an ongoing, effort to achieve this with xdg-desktop-portal
APIs, where the intention is to allow a sandboxed input-leap (or in
theory synergy) to be able to act as both a server and client in a
Wayland session, while still actively requiring user consent. The pieces
that I know of that currently have implementations that ties it all
together are input-leap, xdg-desktop-portal, the GNOME portal backend
(xdg-desktop-portal-gnome & mutter).

The portals in question are input capture[1], for capturing the input
from a display server (to the input leap *server*), and remote
desktop[2], for remote controlling / injecting input events to a display
server (from the input leap *client*). The portal APIs rely on libei[3]
for input event transmission - the portals are there to negotiate
consent and to set up sessions.

It should be possible to use input-leap with mouse/keyboard sharing with
all the building blocks manually compiled, but nothing has shipped in
distributions yet.


Jonas

[1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/714
[2] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop
[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei