(Apologies in advance: * I just joined this list -- I should probably lurk a little bit more before posting, but I guess I'm impatient. * This is basically a duplicate of an email I sent to the expert@linux-mandrake.org list yesterday morning -- no response so far and I guess I don't expect one -- probably not an appropriate list, but maybe I should have given it more time.) Since I started making a transition to Linux, I've been looking for a keyboard macro program. By that I mean a program that will intercept the keystrokes from my keyboard and send a string of keycodes to an arbitrary program. (In dos/Windows (I'm not 100% certain I actually ever used a keyboard macro program in Windows) I could set up certain keystroke combinations to send long strings to any program. Maybe <alt><shift><F10> would send my sig, or a salutation, like "Dear Sir", or whatever.) Haven't found anything so far in Linux. I've looked at and/or tried: loadkeys: I can use loadkeys to send a different keycode, but haven't found a way (and don't think there is a way) to send a string of keycodes in response to one keystroke. expect: From what I've read and tried so far I think: * Programs like kwrite (just one example) don't accept input from stdin, or send screen output to stdout, so I don't think something like expect, which, IIUC, looks at things on stdout and sends things to stdin, can have any effect on kwrite * Assuming kwrite could accept input from stdin, I'd really want expect to be sort of a filter on stdin -- look at things coming in on stdin, and replace them with something else if it triggers one of the "expect rules" that I would set up The author of klipper promised to do somethings in the klipper with kde 3.0 (and he might have) but even so, those things will work primarily with kde applications. So, I'd like to take a semi-serious look at writing my own program. (By semi-serious, I mean that I probably don't have the programming skills at this time to actually write the program, but I'd like to attempt to figure out a workable approach and what would be involved.) In the dos world, one way of writing a program like this is to intercept (hook) the keyboard interrupt, look at the input from the keyboard, and if appropriate, substitute some different input. Anybody know: * If a similar approach can be followed in Linux? * Where to learn more about how Linux handles this type of thing and how I could hook the interrupt in Linux? (Must I dig into the Linux kernel? Into the whole Linux kernel?) * Pointers to resources (books, articles, appropriate mail lists, etc.)? * Other suggestions? Of course, it would be wonderful to hear that someone else is already working on such a program ;-) Randy Kramer -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
