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macroboard

Utility to turn any keyboard into a macro key board on Linux (via libinput).

Features

  • Implement shortcuts on your external keyboards in Rust

  • Create one-key or key-combination keyboard shortcuts

  • Support an unlimited amount of keyboards

  • Differentiate between all keyboards

  • Run closures on press and release of your shortcuts

  • Works on Linux! (both Wayland and X.Org1)

  • Option to keep the keyboard functionality of the macro keyboard while in use

  • No paid license, everything is free software!

Known issues / contribution opportunities

  • Specified key codes map to keys as if the layout was QWERTY. If you use a different layout, you can adapt your key codes so that they map properly (a PR to fix this would be very welcome).

  • The key combination detection algorithm is sufficient for a macro key board but is a bit unpolished. I might give it a bit more time, again PRs are welcome! :)

About Windows support

The Windows API is really not great, there is no good way to achieve the functionality of this project on Windows as open source software.

If you need a macro key board on Windows using macroboard, set up a Linux machine on which you plug your keyboard. Then, network the Linux machine with the Windows machine to send events from Linux to Windows. I know, this is very sad.

lmao why?

There are two main requirements for an operating system to support macroboard in a useful way:

  • Provide a way to differentiate keyboard inputs from one keyboard or another. Good news, Windows has a low level API to do that: RawInput.
  • Provide a way to block inputs coming from macro board keyboards. Good news-ish, Windows provides a very inefficient but sufficient (I guess) way to do this: global hooks.

Nice. Just one small problem: those are two different APIs that cannot co-operate in a reliable way. The only option left is to write a custom driver to implement Linux-like functionality in the Windows NT kernel, which is hard to do in a secure way and costs multiple hundreds of dollars to publish because of certification requirements. I am not doing that.

I used to have okay feelings about Windows as a platform before this experience. Now, that's a different story.

Footnotes

  1. X.Org has only been tested in development so far, but considering I only use libinput it should also work well to the extent that X.Org does? Confirmation from third parties would be appreciated. ↩