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Focus-Aware Key Remapping on Linux: The Hard Parts
Episode 4684
Published 1 day ago
Description
Daniel's been using a foot pedal for dictation for a year and a half, and it works great — until he needs it to behave differently depending on which app has focus. This episode breaks down the nuts and bolts of focus-conditional key remapping on Linux: where keyd lives in the input stack, how it learns about window focus through keyd-application-mapper, and why the X11 and Wayland paths are completely different beasts. We get into the polling race conditions that can corrupt held key sequences, and why the clean solution — a remapping hook inside the display server — doesn't exist yet.