Wayland, Uinput and Autokey

[sebastiansam55]

Going forward, Ubuntu (probably the most popular OS for our users) has decided to switch to wayland, this obviously causes a lot of issues for autokey, there are a few things that we should do right now to mitigate this;

1. We should update the readme to clarify that Ubuntu 21.04 defaults to using wayland and that it's pretty easy to swap back to X11 as of now (select "Ubuntu" instead of "Ubuntu on Wayland" at the login screen)
2. Think about how (or even if) we are going to try and support Wayland. As it stands right now reliance on X11 exists in many files so the changes here are probably going to be quite large.
   Another large issue that wayland presents is that I believe a design decision has been made to not have feature parity with X11 especially when it comes to input for security reasons.
3. Someone should begin work on implementing uinput as this will workaround some of the wayland limitations. The main question is how should this be implemented, as a complete replacement for the keyboard module, a new module uinput or changes to the backend to make it an option to swap from X to Uinput for reading/sending events.

In writing this out it seems like we are going to end up doing a total replacement, as the lesser implementations don't address that Autokey uses X11 for listening for hotkeys.

[sebastiansam55]

And obviously not having X11 options removes a lot of other features which cannot be replaced with uinput. Stuff like window filters, most of the window module unless wmctrl is updated for wayland (it may be already I'm not sure), other stuff I'm sure is dependent on X11

[josephj11]

We have a very old issue open for this: #87.

See also PR #844 which points to a repo where uinput was implemented and ydotool which does the same thing using daemon.

[josephj11]

Would it be possible to add an abstraction layer for API calls, etc. that insulates the main code and user scripts from this? Then AutoKey could detect whether X11 is available or not and act appropriately without disturbing the rest of the logic or user scripts.

Would it be possible to write an i/o daemon for AutoKey that could run with elevated permissions and just do whatever lower level i/o requests are needed via API calls? This might get around the restrictions that Wayland imposes on user tasks without opening a huge security vulnerability.