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Comment by playingalong | Hacker News Reader

The readme hardly explains what it does.

Is it a keyboard macro service? E.g. for a given keyboard shortcut I get a predefined sequence of keys pressed?

I think the GIF is supposed to give the breakdown. As I understand, type "@mymacro" and it can expand it to whatever you define.

Wouldn't hurt to have a description in text though...

I do realise it now that it's missing it's usage. It's a simple keyboard macro which supports all printable characters for triggers and everything for expansions. It sends native key presses if all the expansion are printable characters. If not, it uses clipboard and sends `Ctrl+V`

I'm used to user-facing macros (as opposed to say a Lisp macro) being scripts triggered by a keyboard shortcut, so the terminology was confusing to me. Calling this "text expansion" or "text substitution" would have made immediate sense.

Thanks! I think maybe not everyone understands exactly what a "keyboard macro" is, that you type something and it fills out predefined text. At least judging by some comments here :)

I think more people know what a keylogger is and are confused by that.

It's mysterious to me as well, but yeah after looking through the code briefly I think you define macros in the keydoggerrc file, and then keydogger watches the clipboard for triggers and responds accordingly. I love the idea, still a bit too much in the dark on the implementation to have an opinion though. Given the highly sensitive nature of the clipboard, I appreciate how small the app is because it's auditable.

OP: Cool project, thanks for sharing!

You get it perfectly. Being auditable was one of the priority which is exactly why it's small.

Regarding the clipboard, it's a third party dependency. I looked into implementing Wayland clipboard myself but it is too deep Wayland. The only reason clipboard exists is because I cannot send non-printable characters using uinput.

I do agree the README was terrible. I've fixed it.

I hate to be that guy, but the name is neither helpful to explain what it does nor will it facilitate adoption. Show me the IT department that won't freak out when it sees a process called "keylogger".

Apart from that I will certainly try it because I have a use for a lightweight one job - one tool kind of typing helper. I guess others will too.

I have a feeling any IT place that's fuzzy matching process names to raise alarms on "keydogger" is not the kind of place that's going to let users install 3rd party programs with access to /dev/uinput to customize their Wayland on Linux install in the first place. Nor should every open source app be worried about businesses or user growth rate.

I'm not sure what the origin of "keydogger" is but at least there aren't 10 apps with the name and it's pronounceable.

My workstation was lockdown for downloading ProcessHacker

It looks like dabbrev in Emacs maybe?!

Looked up `abbrev-mode` and that is a correct analogy. Abbrev mode also handles emojis, pretty cool. But then it's Emacs so I shouldn't be surprised.

Offtopic, I wish my younger self followed RTFM when I used to use Emacs.

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