Mapping pointer events to keys and the other way around?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 02:08:44PM +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> with many tablets, mice with dozens of buttons and multimedia
> keyboards around the distinction between a mouse button and a keyboard
> key is not very useful from a user's point of view.
> 
> To the contrary, it's confusing and limiting.
> 
> There are some options for generating mouse events with xkb - there
> was the right button emulation for Macs and the mouse emulation on the
> keypad, these are hopefully still working and could be used as an
> example of translation in one way.

fwiw, right button mouse emulation is done by a virtual kernel device, mouse
emulation on the keypad is an XKB feature

> However, I can't find any documented way that would allow a mouse
> button generate a key press or input a text string (or other arbitrary
>  sequence of key presses and releases).
> 
> There was some Wacom-specific support in their driver but that does
> not work for plain mice and is probably non-functional in current
> version of the driver anyway.
> 
> Is there just documentation missing in xinput(1) and evdev(4) or is
> there no such feature?

no, it's a wacom-specific feature and quite painful to maintain anyway. I
don't have any plans to add this to any other driver, it's too flimsy.

Cheers,
  Peter