The Fat Controller

TFC is a library for simulating mouse and keyboard events. This library was built for use by TFC-server, a server that allows for remote control of a PC via a mobile app.

Features

• Mouse clicks
• Mouse motion (relative and absolute)
• Mouse scrolling (smooth scrolling where supported)
• Key presses
• Translating Unicode characters to key presses
• Typing arbitrary Unicode strings
• Getting the mouse position
• Getting the size of the screen

Platforms

• Linux - With X11
• Linux - Without X11
• macOS
• Windows

Usage

Add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
tfc = "0.7"

Linux

There are two implementations for Linux, one that uses X11, and one that depends only on the Linux kernel. The implementation that doesn't use X11 is missing some features. It is intended for Wayland but Wayland is a bit more locked down compared to X11, hence the missing features.

By default (with the check-x11 feature enabled), build-time detection of X11 will be performed to determine which implementation to use. Disabling default features will disable this check and the Wayland implementation will be used unconditionally. The x11 feature can be used to choose the X11 implementation unconditionally.

With X11

Before using the X11 implementation, the X11, XTest and xkbcommon development libraries need to be installed. Using apt, the following snippet can be used.

sudo apt install libx11-dev libxtst-dev libxkbcommon-dev

Without X11

The non-X11 implementation (called Wayland within the code base) uses /dev/uinput. Before this can be used, TFC needs permission to write to the device. To grant permissions temporarily (until the next reboot), use the following snippet.

sudo chmod +0666 /dev/uinput

To grant permissions permanently, use the following snippet.

# Create a group
sudo groupadd -r uinput
# Add yourself to the group
sudo usermod -aG uinput $USER
# Give the group permissions to use the uinput kernel module
echo 'KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="uinput", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"' \
| sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/60-tfc.rules

Use the following snippet if this doesn't take effect immediately. If all else fails, reboot.

udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger

To revoke permissions, use the following snippet.

sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/60-tfc.rules

Example

use tfc::{Context, Error, traits::*};
use std::{f64::consts::PI, thread, time::Duration};

fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    let radius = 100.0;
    let steps = 200;
    let revolutions = 3;
    let delay = Duration::from_millis(10);

    let mut ctx = Context::new()?;
    let center = ctx.cursor_location()?;
    let center = (center.0 as f64 - radius, center.1 as f64);

    for step in 0..steps * revolutions {
        thread::sleep(delay);
        let angle = step as f64 * 2.0 * PI / steps as f64;
        let x = (center.0 + radius * angle.cos()).round() as i32;
        let y = (center.1 + radius * angle.sin()).round() as i32;
        ctx.mouse_move_abs(x, y)?;
    }

    Ok(())
}