INPUTPLUG(1)

💖 INPUTPLUG(1) 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, because i'm about to tell you about inputplug — it's an XInput event monitor and honestly? it's giving main character energy for your X server. ✨

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

inputplug [-v] [-n] [-d] [-0] -c command-prefix

inputplug [-h|--help]

like, that's the whole vibe. no cap. 🫶

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so inputplug is a daemon. she connects to a running X server and just… watches. 👀 specifically she monitors the XInput hierarchy change events, and those little cuties show up whenever a device gets attached or removed, enabled or disabled, etc. literally every time the device tree does a lil dance, she knows. 💅

when a hierarchy change happens, inputplug parses the event notification structure and calls the command you specified with command-prefix. and the command gets four arguments, in this exact order:

command-prefix event-type device-id device-type device-name

so the event type? it may be one of these icons: 🎀

• XIMasterAdded
• XIMasterRemoved
• XISlaveAdded
• XISlaveRemoved
• XISlaveAttached
• XISlaveDetached
• XIDeviceEnabled
• XIDeviceDisabled

and the device type? may be any of these queens: 👑

• XIMasterPointer
• XIMasterKeyboard
• XISlavePointer
• XISlaveKeyboard
• XIFloatingSlave

the device identifier is an integer (just a number, bestie, nothing fancy). and the device name may have embedded spaces — so watch out for that when you're handling it. 🙈

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

here's a lil summary of the options, bestie, because you deserve to know:

• -h, --help — show help. and --help shows more details (she's an overachiever, we love her for it). 🌈
• -v — be a bit more verbose. just a bit. a sprinkle of extra talking. ✨
• -n — start up, monitor events, but don't actually run anything. and if you've got verbose mode on, she'd print the actual command she would have run. also this one implies -d, sneaky little thing. 💀
• -d — don't daemonise. run in the foreground. stay with me, i'm right here. 🥺
• -0 — on start, trigger added and enabled events for each plugged device. a master device will trigger the "added" event, while a slave device will trigger both the "added" and the "enabled" event. double the events, double the fun. 🎉
• -c command-prefix — the command prefix to run. unfortunately, currently this is passed to execvp(3) directly, so spaces aren't allowed. yeah, i know, it's a whole thing. this is subject to change in future, so keep an eye out. 👀
• -p pidfile — write the process ID of the running daemon to the file pidfile. cute lil paper trail. 📝

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

• DISPLAY — the X11 display to connect to. that's it, that's the one. 🌟

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• xinput(1)

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright (C) 2013, 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021 Andrej Shadura.

Copyright (C) 2014, 2020 Vincent Bernat.

Licensed as MIT/X11.

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

Andrej Shadura <andrewsh@debian.org>

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that, fr fr. 💅✨

and just so you have the receipts — this lil masterpiece is dated 2020-11-01 and it lives under the manual name INPUTPLUG(1) in the INPUTPLUG(1) section. slay, go plug in a device and watch the magic happen. 🎀🫶