XKBEVD(1)

✨ NAME ✨

Okay bestie, this is the manual for xkbevd, the XKB event daemon. 💅

---

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

xkbevd [ options ]

---

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

Okay so, real talk first: this thing is very raw and only partially implemented 🙈 It's a rough prototype for developers, NOT a general purpose tool for end users. Like, please don't make it your whole personality. The author thinks it might make a suitable replacement for xev, but they're not signing up for that, mind you. It's an interesting idea though ✨

So what does it actually do? The xkbevd event daemon listens for specified XKB events and runs requested commands when they happen. Its configuration file is a list of event specification/action pairs and/or variable definitions. Iconic behaviour, honestly 🦋

Event specifications are a short XKB event name followed by a string or identifier in parentheses. That's the qualifier. Empty parentheses mean no qualifier, and they're how you set the default command, the one that gets applied to any event that doesn't match your other specs. The qualifier's meaning depends on the event type:

• Bell events match on the name of the bell 🔔
• Message events match on the contents of the message string 💬
• Slow key events accept any of press, release, accept, or reject ⌨️

No other events are currently recognized, so don't go looking for them rn 💀

Actions are an optional keyword followed by an optional string argument. Right now xkbev recognizes these actions: none, ignore, echo, printEvent, sound, and shell. If you don't specify an action, the string is treated as the name of a sound file to play... unless it starts with an exclamation point (!), in which case it's treated as a shell command. Main character energy 👑

Variables in the argument string get expanded using fields from the event before the argument string is passed to the action processor. The general syntax is either $c or $(str), where c is a single character and str is a string of any length. Every parameter has both a single-character name and a long name 🧚

The list of recognized parameters changes from event to event and is way too long to list here right now. It's a developer release, so you'll be expected to read the source code, and evargs.c is the one to look at 📜

About the actions: ignore, echo, printEvent, sound, and shell do exactly what you'd expect from commands with those names. The one exception is sound, which has only been implemented and tested on SGI machines 😭 It launches an external program right now, so it should be pretty easy to adapt, especially if you're into audio cues that show up about half a second after you expect them. Lowkey iconic 🙈

The only variables currently recognized are soundDirectory and soundCmd. I'm sure you can figure out what they do 💅

---

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -help — Prints a usage message. It's way more up-to-date than anything in this man page, so trust it over me 🫶
• -cfg file — Picks the configuration file to read. If you don't specify one, xkbevd checks ~/.xkb/xkbevd.cf first, then $(LIBDIR)/xkb/xkbevd.cf, in that order ✨
• -sc cmd — Sets the command used to play sounds 🔊
• -sd directory — Sets a top-level directory for sound files 📂
• -display display — Sets the display to use. If you don't include this, xkbevd uses $DISPLAY 🖥️
• -bg — Tells xkbevd to fork itself and run in the background 🌈
• -synch — Forces synchronization of all X requests. Slow, bestie 🐌
• -v — Prints more info, including debugging messages. Stack them (like -v -v) and you'll get more output, up to a point 🔍
• -version — Prints the program version and exits 🍓

---

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

xev(1), xkbwatch(1), X(7).

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Erik Fortune, Silicon Graphics 💜

---

Okay that's the whole vibe, periodt! 🌈 This page is from X Version 11, the xkbevd 1.1.5 release, and it's filed under XKBEVD(1). Stay iconic, bestie 💖🫶