Re: [xmonad] Re: two beginner's questions on XMonad config

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:53:15AM +0000, Riccardo Murri wrote:

Riccardo Murri writes:

...

1) Since I have no modifier keys left on my laptop, and I'm an Emacs user (which takes away many C- and M- keybindings), I'd like to bind most XMonad actions with "C-z" as a prefix (using EZConfig).

Is there a way to bind a key so that "C-z C-z" sends a C-z to the currently focused window? (Ratpoison has a similar feature for C-t)

I did some googling and found out that:

1) the quickest solution is to use "xdotool" [http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/], which can (among other nifty things), send a fake keypress to the currently focused window::

("C-z C-z", spawn "xdotool key ctrl+z")

Nifty! Would you mind adding this to the FAQ page on the wiki as a lightweight solution? Many people have asked for this.

2) According to:

http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/GeneratingSyntheticX11Events

there are two Xlib programmatic solution, one using the XTest extension (recommended), and one using XSendEvent(). As far as I understand, there are no bindings for XTest in the Graphics.X11 module, so one has to code using sendEvent...

With the following code, I have been able to send a Ctrl+Z to urxvt and "xev" windows directly from XMonad::

I could have sworn there was already a contrib module that does this, using code similar to what you wrote. But I can't find it. Perhaps it just got kicked around on the ML but never actually made it into the repo. Anyway, the xdotool is a nice solution regardless. -Brent