WITH-LOCK-EX(1)

📦 version 8.0.1build1, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 WITH-LOCK-EX(1) — the chiark-utils-bin era 💖

okay bestie, so this page lives in the chiark-utils-bin collection, and the manual itself is filed under WITH-LOCK-EX(1) (iykyk, the naming is chaotic, we love her anyway). But the actual star of this page? Her name is xduplic-copier. Let's go 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

xduplic-copier — type into multiple X windows at once 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

xduplic-copier

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So xduplic-copier literally lets you type into multiple X windows at once. That's it, that's the whole vibe. 👑

She comes with a very basic user interface for picking which windows you wanna type into. No cap — "very basic" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but we'll get there. 💅

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • command-line arguments — xduplic-copier ignores them. All of them. Every single one. She said "not my business" 🙈

✨ MODES ✨

She pops up a small window with some text in it, and she's got exactly two modes:

Idle: "i 0" (red); Typing "T count" (green)

If you type keystrokes into xduplic-copier, they get replicated to all the selected windows (if there are any, bestie — if there aren't, nothing happens, obviously). You can also still type into the selected windows individually in the normal way, don't worry. 💖

count is the number of selected windows.

The starting mode is Idle, and you should left-click to start selecting. That's your entry point, girlie ✨

Selecting: "S count" (white)

In this mode xduplic-copier has grabbed the mouse pointer and you can indicate which windows you're gonna want to type into. main character energy honestly 😌

✨ MOUSE ACTIONS ✨

  • Left-click in xduplic-copier — switch between typing and selecting modes. 🔁
  • Right-click in xduplic-copier — quit. bye bestie 👋
  • Left-click in another window while selecting — select this window. (Beeps if already selected. 🙈)
  • Right-click in another window while selecting — deselect this window. (Beeps if not selected. 😭)
  • Right-click in root window (ie, desktop background) while selecting — deselect all windows. 🧹
  • Q key while selecting — quits. ⌨️

✨ XTERM AND ALLOW SENDEVENTS ✨

okay this is the part where it gets messy, buckle up 🫶

xduplic-copier does her work by generating synthetic events for the selected windows, using XSendEvent. Unfortunately the xterm authors think that allowing XSendEvent is a security problem.

They are wrong: any untrusted person can already take over your xterms anyway. 💀

But regardless — the xterm authors have configured xterm to discard synthetic events by default. So yeah, that's a thing.

You can solve this at runtime by bringing up the ctrl-leftbutton menu in each xterm, and ticking the option "Allow SendEvents". Or you can set the allowSendEvents in your xterm X resources. Either one, dealer's choice ✨

Neither of these significantly reduce your security. Indeed, xterm itself allows these properties to be set via the X toolkit system's remote widget property setting arrangements — so it would be possible for xduplic-copier to set this property itself on any xterms it encountered. Unfortunately doing so would be a lot of tedious programming. 😭

✨ BUGS ✨

If one of the windows you have selected is closed, and you try typing, xduplic-copier will crash due to an unhandled X11 error. 💀

If you notice that you've got into this state, you cannot retain your set of selected windows, because there is no way to click on the now-destroyed window to deselect it. Iconic behaviour, honestly. 🙃

You can keep xduplic-copier from crashing by right-clicking on the background in selecting mode, and then reselecting all your windows — which may be marginally more convenient than restarting it. marginally. 🍓

The UI is perhaps excessively sparse. 🎀

Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote xduplic-copier some time in 2002, and updated it in 2013. The manpage is from 2013. 📅

xduplic-copier is govered by the GNU GPL, v3 or later. 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one shipped from Debian back in July 2003, filed under WITH-LOCK-EX(1) in the chiark-utils-bin set — go forth and type into all the windows at once 💅✨👑

📦 where this page comes from