Hotkey proxy

This is a simple script to intercept a hotkey during the specified program execution.

The script uses python-xlib X library to listen for KeyPress events in specified program. Now it's possible to run any program and specify our shell command to be executed on the hotkey pressed.

Usage

usage: hotkey-proxy.py [-h] --key KEY [--modifier MODIFIER] --cmd CMD program

positional arguments:
  program               Program to run

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --key KEY, -k KEY     Key to capture (examples: S, M, etc.)
  --modifier MODIFIER, -m MODIFIER
                        Modifier to capture (examples: shift, ctrl, alt, any, none)
  --cmd CMD, -c CMD     Shell command to run on captured key

• key argument specifies the keyboard button to be pressed
• modifier sets the modifier for key that could be one of the following: shift, ctrl, alt, any, none. any modifier will trigger when key is pressed with any of shift, ctrl, alt or none of them (just key). none will trigger only when key is pressed without modifiers
• cmd specifies the shell string to be executed

Example

There is an example ./example.sh that runs obsidian program and sets the execution of echo lol >> /tmp/log.txt shell string after pressing the hotkey Ctrl+S each time.

TODO

• Add multiple hotkeys

• It's not well-tested with different programs, so, there could be some issues. There is the problem in window identification after running a program because we cannot simply get the X11 window by PID (I tried to use _NET_WM_PID window property for identification, but it's unstable). Now it was temporarily solved by waiting for active window to change