Key Injector for OSX

Listen for keyboard commands and inject keyboard events to the OS. This is useful for hacking together hotkeys with non-standard keyboards (like a leap motion or foot pedal) or making a simple joystick "driver" (if you could call it that).

How it works

Listen on a unix domain socket at /tmp/keys.sock for commands with a simple protocol (as described below) and convert these to keyboard events:

In OSX's Quartz library, there are functions CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent and CGEventPost which create and post keyboard events as if they had come from a keyboard.

You could probably easily get this working with Windows or Linux by replacing Quartz calls with proper keyboard event creation/posting calls.

Install

git clone git@github.com:bkase/key-injector.git
git clone git@github.com:abarnert/pykeycode.git
cd pykeycode
python setup.py install

Run

python key_injector.py

Command protocol

Send one of the following onto the unixgram socket:

• u + key (release key key)
• d + key (press key key)
• t + key (tap key key)

Where key is either:

• [a-z] or [0-9] or other non-whitespace characters
• a space
• Left, Up, Right, or Down (corresponding to arrow keys)

examples:

• dLeft
• dt
• uLeft
• ut
• tg

TODO (if you want to contribute):

• Make protocol less hacky
• Support other keys