Customisable keybindings

[philj56]

I've been meaning to look into customisable keybindings for a while, but I'm not sure what the best way is / if it's actually necessary.

Pros

• Don't need to change tofi to add a new keybinding.
• People may want non-standard mappings of existing bindings.

Cons

• Significant extra complexity - need names for actions, keybinding parser, data structures for holding bindings.
• Potential option bloat, depending on how it's implemented - there are already a lot of options.
• I feel like most people aren't going to have conflicting expectations about which bindings do what; so as long as tofi covers all the expected keybindings, the need for customisation is probably very limited. The main motivator in my eyes is for people who have different expectations about what should happen when they switch keyboard layouts — should the bindings follow the physical keys, or the "logical" keys? It might be easy to handle this with a single extra option.

The options I plan to look into, then, are:

• No customisation, but a --physical-keybindings flag or similar - this is my preferred option, unless a lot of people really want customisation.
• Sway/Hyprland style bindings, e.g. --binding=Ctrl+c,close
  • Nice, because this is probably how it'd be organised internally (i.e. from binding -> action, not action -> binding)
  • Needs lots of lines for bindings in a config file (currently there are 25 keybindings in tofi)
• rofi style bindings, e.g. --bind-delete-word=Ctrl+w,Ctrl+Backspace
  • I don't like this due to the number of options it adds (and it makes less sense to me)
  • However it does make the config file a bit simpler (8 lines)

[philj56]

I've added a --physical-keybindings option in 47a7f68, which defaults to true. Hopefully this is enough for nearly everyone's use case.

[hilaolu]

can't wait for this feature

[hilaolu]

when will next version release?

[mb720]

Would this also allow to resize tofi's font while it's displaying?

[s1n7ax]

Anyone have any idea how to use --physical-keybindings. I have no clue what following supposed to mean

	# If true, use physical keys for shortcuts, regardless of the current
	# keyboard layout. If false, use the current layout's keys.
	physical-keybindings = true

[MahouShoujoMivutilde]

It means to use keycodes instead of keysyms, so if you switch your keyboard layout (e.g. latin to cyrillic) your hotkeys still work.

But if you have e.g. dvorak set on X11 / wayland compositor level it'll still respond to hotkeys according to how your physical keys on a keyboard are. But if you don't want that - you can set the option to false.

Discussion #41 (comment)

[hvhaugwitz]

I was just about to create a new feature request for remapping C-j to Confirm (as seen in emacs, rofi, dmenu and other tools); but I think it is time to start providing Sway/Hyprland style key bindings (as mentioned above) instead of adding more and more default key bindings (see for example #97 or #135).

To avoid an overfilled default configuration I would suggest to only bind one key per action by default and leave customization to the users.