shortcutd

Global shortcuts using evdev

What

shortcutd is a daemon and client library to allow listening for global shortcuts for systems that don't support it otherwise (such as wayland).

The shortcutd daemon hooks into the evdev system and exposes a dbus interface for clients to hook into to. By separating out the code that hooks into evdev (which needs to be done as root) into a separate daemon it allows non-privileged users to hook into global shortcuts.

Protection against clients using the shortcutd daemon for a keylogger is done by only allowing 3 shortcuts without modifiers to be registered at the same time.

Starting the daemon

• Copy the dbus configuration nl.icewind.shortcutd.conf into /etc/dbus-1/system.d/
• Start the daemon as root (or use the provided systemd service).

Rust api

use futures::{pin_mut, StreamExt};
use shortcutd::{Shortcut, ShortcutClient};
use std::error::Error;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let client = ShortcutClient::new().await?;
  
    let shortcut: Shortcut = "<Ctrl><Alt>-KeyO".parse()?;
  
    let stream = client.listen(shortcut).await?;
  
    pin_mut!(stream);
  
    while let Some(event) = stream.next().await {
      println!("{} {}", event.shortcut, event.state);
    }
    Ok(())
}

D-Bus api

• register a new shortcut using the Register method at nl.icewind.shortcutd/register

• listen to the signal at the path returned from the Register method to get notified when the shortcut is triggered.

  A boolean parameter is provided with the signal to distinguish shortcut presses from releases.