How evdev-based key remappers can disable DWT ("disable while typing")

[canadaduane]

I had a 3-week mystery on my hands: Why was typing in Linux so prone to accidental mouse clicks? Every 2nd or 3rd sentence and my hands hovering about my laptop's touchpad while typing would create BTN_LEFT events that sent the focus away from my email/github issue/text editor and into whatever the mouse cursor was hovering over. What a frustrating experience!

Well, it turns out that I had enabled a key remapper called keyd at the evdev level, and this grabbed my keyboard's input and forwarded keypress events to a virtual keyboard. This in turn broke the pairing between my "internal" keyboard and touchpad in libinput.

libinput normally notices that an internal touchpad and internal keyboard go together, and automatically enables DWT ("disable while typing") on the touchpad. This would have saved me a lot of desperate Ctrl-Z-to-undo attempts over the past few weeks!

But I learned a LOT about libinput, kernel events, touchpad capabilities, USB report descriptors, and many other nuanced aspects of touchpad input on Linux.

And it got me thinking--should key remappers be implemented at the same level as touchpad remappers (like Touchégg and Gebaar)?

[rvaiya]

I would argue that the correct solution to this problem is to just ship a quirks file with said remapping tools. Libinput includes a quirks mechanism to account for differences in hardware for a reason. If you look at /usr/share/libinput you will see a large number of files intended to account for hardware specific discrepancies, the virtual device created by a remapping tool is just another such device.

Implementing remapping tools on top of libinput would require them to be built into the compositor. The tools you listed just passively use libinput as an input source and then perform operations higher up the input stack. Key remapping tools are also less likely to benefit from the facilities offered by using libinput as an input source since keyboards are much simpler than pointing devices. Finally, they would also lose the benefit of functioning in the absence of libinput (e.g virtual terminals, legacy X drivers).

[Archie-2021]

I have keyd installed and when start mouseless nothing happens.

Is there a way to use config for xmouseless? I tried that first and it was working fine and I liked it , the only problems was that the default config uses jkil keys instead of using vim keybinds .

Is there a way to just change that? I don't care about the rest.

[canadaduane]

It looks like the only way to configure xmouseless is to modify config.h and recompile: https://github.com/jbensmann/xmouseless/blob/master/config.h

[Archie-2021]

It looks like the only way to configure xmouseless is to modify config.h and recompile: https://github.com/jbensmann/xmouseless/blob/master/config.h

Thanks , it solved my issue, is there any documentation on this? I can't find how to drag and drop with this.

[canadaduane]

On Feb 15, 2025, at 4:23 AM, Archie-2021 ***@***.***> wrote: It looks like the only way to configure xmouseless is to modify config.h and recompile: https://github.com/jbensmann/xmouseless/blob/master/config.h Thanks , it solved my issue, is there any documentation on this? I can't find how to drag and drop with this.

I'm not sure, this is my first time encountering xmouseless.

[Archie-2021]

I figured it out , thanks for your help