With footswitcher you use a cheap USB pedal to switch easily between "insert mode" and "escape mode" in Vim. In fact, you can switch between any sequence of keys to be pressed.
There exist already hardware hacks for using this kind of USB pedal to switch Vim modes. footswitcher works without any hardware modification and also with more than two words to switch between.
To configure the series of key presses that you want to use, please use footswitch. You define a series of key presses (by its hex values), separated by "FF".
footswitch -S '29 0C FF 29'
Here the first press triggers the keys Escape and "i" (hex values 29 and 0c). The second pedal press triggers Escape. The third press would trigger Escape and "i" again.
footswitch -S '0B 08 0F 0F 12 FF 2C FF 1A 12 15 0F 07'
Here the first press triggers "hello". The second pedal press triggers " " (space) and the third press triggers "world". The fourth press would trigger "hello" again.
To use footswitcher, just run
footswitcher
The software should automatically find the correct pedal device and send the virtual key presses in the name of the keyboard device. If this fails, please specify the correct device files like so:
footswitcher -i /dev/input/event4 -o /dev/input/event1
With event4 being the USB pedal device file and event1 being the keyboard device file (use lsusb to find the correct device files on your system).
footswitcher stands on the shoulders of footswitch by Radoslav Gerganov.
Copyright 2018 by Matthias Clausen matthiasclausen@posteo.de.
MIT License (see LICENSE file).