A Linux utility to type character strings into /dev/uinput
I recently stumbled upon wtype, which first appeared on GitHub just after I created uinputchars. For my only use case typing credentials into various programs running under Wayland, this is a much better tool – no need for special permissions, inverse keymaps, or milli-sleeps. It works flawlessly as a drop-in replacement for uinputchars.
Thus I declare uinputchars dormant and discourage its use (unless it solves a problem that xdotool/wtype cannot solve for you).
A typical use case is entering passwords. In contrast to classical password managers, uinputchars can type character strings into anything - Web forms, e-mail clients, Emacs - without any client support. In contrast to xdotool, it does not require X; it also works under Wayland or even on the console.
Generally, uinputchars is run without arguments.
Character strings are read from standard input. There is currently no option to pass them on the command line because this would make them appear in the process table.
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Applications receiving events from
/dev/uinputmust be given time to process them. This is achieved by brief sleeps that can be adjusted via command-line options. -
This utility reads the console keymap (as activated with loadkeys). Thus, to work as expected, this should match the keyboard layout used by the desktop environment, if any (under Wayland or X).
In particular, the
uinputdevice is not the same as the real keyboard and may have a different keymap associated with it. For example, in sway, configure all inputs to use the same keymap (e.g.,input "*" xkb_layout de), not just the actual keyboard, to include/dev/uinput. -
The current implementation only accepts ISO-8859-1 characters (encoded as specified by the locale). Depending on the console keymap in use, only a subset of them may be accessible.
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Retrieving the console keymap and writing into
/dev/uinputwill generally require root rights. It is recommended to configure this in/etc/sudoers.
Arch Linux users can install from the AUR.
Generally under Linux, just run (GNU) make, and move or link the resulting executable to wherever you want. If this does not work, I welcome your patches.