Crikey in Python, and generating key events with XTest (Shallow Thoughts)

Crikey in Python, and generating key events with XTest

A user on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC, also known as the XO) platform wrote to ask me how to use crikey on that platform.

There are two stages to getting crikey running on a new platform:

1. Build it, and
2. Figure out how to make a key run a specific program.

The crikey page contains instructions I've collected for binding keys in various window managers, since that's usually the hard part. On normal Linux machines the first step is normally no problem. But apparently the OLPC comes with gcc but without make or the X header files. (Not too surprising: it's not a machine aimed at developers and I assume most people developing for the machine cross-compile from a more capable Linux box.)

We're still working on that (if my correspondant gets it working, I'll post the instructions), but while I was googling for information about the OLPC's X environment I stumbled upon a library I didn't know existed: python-xlib. It turns out it's possible to do most or all of what crikey does from Python. The OLPC is Python based; if I could write crikey in Python, it might solve the problem. So I whipped up a little key event generating script as a test.

Unfortunately, it didn't solve the OLPC problem (they don't include python-xlib on the machine either) but it was a fun exercises, and might be useful as an example of how to generate key events in python-xlib. It supports both event generating methods: the X Test extension and XSendEvent. Here's the script: /pykey-0.1.

But while I was debugging the X Test code, I had to solve a bug that I didn't remember ever solving in the C version of crikey. Sure enough, it needed the same fix I'd had to do in the python version. Two fixes, actually. First, when you send a fake key event through XTest, there's no way to specify a shift mask. So if you need a shifted character like A, you have to send KeyPress Shift, KeyPress a. But if that's all you send, XTest on some systems does exactly what the real key would do if held down and never released: it autorepeats. (But only for a little while, not forever. Go figure.)

So the real answer is to send KeyPress Shift, KeyPress a, KeyRelease a, KeyRelease Shift. Then everything works nicely. I've updated crikey accordingly and released version 0.7 (though since XTest isn't used by default, most users won't see any change from 0.6). In the XSendEvent case, crikey still doesn't send the KeyRelease event -- because some systems actually see it as another KeyPress. (Hey, what fun would computers be if they were consistent and always predictable, huh?)

Both C and Python versions are linked off the crikey page.

Tags: programming, crikey, X11, python
[ 15:50 May 25, 2008    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]