Wayland client and synthetic input

[Zarif Atai]

Dear subscribers of wayland-devel,

As a Vim motions enthusiast, it bothers me that there are too many situations where I'm forced to use a pointer input device (e.g. a mouse) to perform an action. I looked around to see if anyone has developed a tool that would allow me to move or teleport the pointer to a specific location on the screen and perform a click action using keyboard keystrokes. I did not find it, so I decided to create it myself. I have recently started to learn the programming language Rust. I thought this would be a great opportunity to improve my Rust skills, too.

As someone new to both Wayland and Rust, I dove into the Wayland documentation and related Rust crates. Thus far, I have not found any documentation on how to send synthetic input (i.e. mouse movements) to the display server as a Wayland client. According to some LLMs, synthetic input is even heavily restricted in Wayland due to security reasons, making my quest to create this tool impossible.

I would like to ask for your input (no pun intended) on this. Is it true what the LLMs are saying? If so, are there alternative ways to develop such a tool?

I'm looking forward to your responses.

Sincerely,
Zarif Atai
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