[ANNOUNCE] kwin-type v0.1 is released

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hi Vlad,

On Mon, Oct 26, 2026 at 02:23:39PM +0000, Vlad Zahorodnii wrote:
> > Some background: I didn't want to have to make such a utility, but all
> > the existing utilities for this seemed deficient in one way or another
> > -- requiring /dev/uinput or requiring virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1 or
> > using portals + EIS. I actually initially made a utility that used
>
> It's still highly advised that you look for supporting libei. We want to
> remove the fake input protocol in favor of supporting only libei.

Nooooeeeee.... libportal + libei is really stinky. There's gobs of dbus
setup and it's way slower and has more overhead. And then every time you
use it, you have to authorize the caller. So then there's a need for a
`--token-file=...` parameter and logic to automatically replace that and
also lock it properly against concurrent use. And then every invocation
of the tool requires swapping that around and getting new tokens. And
then the flatpak authorization database gets populated with the
authorization. And everytime you autotype, there's a notification popup.

I went down this route, fully implemented it, thought it was disgusting,
and kept looking for better solutions. I'm really glad I found
fake-input. None of the crazy authorization overhead of portals is
required for what this thing is. And it should be fast! It's just a
one-off tool invocation. It's not the same as a remote desktop session
or whatever libei was actually made for.

Jason