I am the OP. What I tried was something along these lines.

e.g. to get w in normal mode to send Ctrl+right, I did the following.

1. Bind w to F14 in normal mode.

2. In i3 config, add `bindsym 0xffcb exec xdotool key ctrl+Right`

If I simply ran the command (`xdotool key ctrl+Right`) in normal mode, it would work but it didn't work via a binding.

This was infact the initial idea behind all this but after quite some testing xdotool turned out to be unreliable so I repurposed it as a shortcut layer.