Feb 13, 2017

Xorg input driver - the easy way, via evdev and uinput

Got to reading short stories in Column Reader from laptop screen before sleep recently, and for an extra-lazy points, don't want to drag my hand to keyboard to flip pages (or columns, as the case might be).

Easy fix - get any input device and bind stuff there to keys you'd normally use.
As it happens, had Xbox 360 controller around for that.

Hard part is figuring out how to properly do it all in Xorg - need to build xf86-input-joystick first (somehow not in Arch core), then figure out how to make it act like a dumb event source, not some mouse emulator, and then stuff like xev and xbindkeys will probably help.

This is way more complicated than it needs to be, and gets even more so when you factor-in all the Xorg driver quirks, xev's somewhat cryptic nature (modifier maps, keysyms, etc), fact that xbindkeys can't actually do "press key" actions (have to use stuff like xdotool for that), etc.

All the while reading these events from linux itself is as trivial as evtest /dev/input/event11 (or for event in dev.read_loop(): ...) and sending them back is just ui.write(e.EV_KEY, e.BTN_RIGHT, 1) via uinput device.

Hence whole binding thing can be done by a tiny python loop that'd read events from whatever specified evdev and write corresponding (desired) keys to uinput.

So instead of +1 pre-naptime story, hacked together a script to do just that - evdev-to-xev (python3/asyncio) - which reads mappings from simple YAML and runs the loop.

For example, to bind right joystick's (on the same XBox 360 controller) extreme positions to cursor keys, plus triggers, d-pad and bumper buttons there:

map:

  ## Right stick
  # Extreme positions are ~32_768
  ABS_RX <-30_000: left
  ABS_RX >30_000: right
  ABS_RY <-30_000: up
  ABS_RY >30_000: down

  ## Triggers
  # 0 (idle) to 255 (fully pressed)
  ABS_Z >200: left
  ABS_RZ >200: right

  ## D-pad
  ABS_HAT0Y -1: leftctrl leftshift equal
  ABS_HAT0Y 1: leftctrl minus
  ABS_HAT0X -1: pageup
  ABS_HAT0X 1: pagedown

  ## Bumpers
  BTN_TL 1: [h,e,l,l,o,space,w,o,r,l,d,enter]
  BTN_TR 1: right

timings:
  hold: 0.02
  delay: 0.02
  repeat: 0.5
Run with e.g.: evdev-to-xev -c xbox-scroller.yaml /dev/input/event11
(see also less /proc/bus/input/devices and evtest /dev/input/event11).
Running the thing with no config will print example one with comments/descriptions.

Given how all iterations of X had to work with whatever input they had at the time, plus not just on linux, even when evdev was around, hard to blame it for having a bit of complexity on top of way simpler input layer underneath.

In linux, aforementioned Xbox 360 gamepad is supported by "xpad" module (so that you'd get evdev node for it), and /dev/uinput for simulating arbitrary evdev stuff is "uinput" module.

Script itself needs python3 and python-evdev, plus evtest can be useful.
No need for any extra Xorg drivers beyond standard evdev.

Most similar tool to such script seem to be actkbd, though afaict, one'd still need to run xdotool from it to simulate input :O=

Github link: evdev-to-xev script (in the usual mk-fg/fgtk scrap-heap)