XFakeKey

About

XFakeKey fakes X keypresses. The keysyms to press/release are read from stdin or from the commandline.

How to build it

Simply running make in the source directory should be enough. The file xfk contains the complete binary. Note: Static linking is a bit problematic at the moment because a few needed XCB symbols are not properly exported in regular XCB libraries (such as xcb_auth) and because glibc appearently doesn't exactly get what 'static linking' means (i.e. even if static linking is done, the original library is still required at runtime to use gethostbyname).

How to use it

There are two ways to run XFakeKey. The first is piping keysyms into stdin, the second involves passing command parameters. If a keysym is prefixed with a +, only a key_press event is generated. If the prefix is -, a key_release is generated. Else a key_press is shortly after followed by a key_release. This can be used to trigger key combinations, such as the following:

./xfk
+XK_Meta_L
XK_2
-XK_Meta_L

or

./xfk +XK_Meta_L XK_2 -XK_Meta_L

This emulates a user pressing Alt+2. XFakeKey first tries to use $DISPLAY to get the X display to connect to. If that fails, :0.0 is used as a fallback.