To tryout xhk, run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/kbingham/xhk.git
cd xhk
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxi-dev libxtst-dev
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
src/xhk -ddd # -ddd executes with the highest debug level to see it working :)
In early 2014, I had an operation on my right elbow to remove some bone fragments. These were remaining from an accident in my teenage years - but had started to cause me some pain and grief. The operation went well - but has a 6 month full recovery time, and for the first 6 weeks my right arm was pretty much immobile. A serious blocker to my coding. There are it would seem some solutions to this. A few companies sell physical keyboards which provide one-handed typing functionality - but these are expensive. Regardless of the price, I have a keyboard already attached to my Laptop - and plugging in an external keyboard isn’t really feasible when sat on the sofa; So I need a better solution
- one which uses my existing keyboard. Now - again - there are a few software implementations of half-keyboard / mirrors using different methods, but not one for linux:
- http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/ has both a Mac and Windows solution
- http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/linux-one-handed-keyboards/ does link to some other linux solutions - but they are either expired or not appropriate.
- http://warped.org/ has a version utilising AutoHotkeys for Windows
- http://blog.xkcd.com/ provides an XKB mapping - but can only use the caps key as a modifier - and doesn’t meet my needs!
I write C code. I use linux, it seemed only reasonable that as a version didn’t exist in this space I would create it and open-source it for all to use (and improve) You can get the sources from GitHub and build it yourself by following the instructions in the Getting Started section above. Once the application is running - it is processing all your keypresses and decides if it should mirror them. ‘Backspace’ is mirrored with the ‘Tab’ key, whilst ‘Enter’ is mirrored with ‘Caps-Lock’ If you use this - do drop me a mail to let me know how you get on, and if you find any problems I’ll look into them to fix them. Perhaps in the future I’ll pull together a GTK frontend for it, but it depends on how much use it gets.
This code is released under the GNU GPL v2 or later