Virtual input devices (like Barrier/Synergy) on kwin-wayland

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 12:22 PM Povilas Kanapickas <povilas at radix.lt> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to work on adding support for virtual input devices to
> kwin-wayland. The wayland/X input stack engineer Peter Hutterer has
> developed a library called libei [1] that is likely the way forward to
> solve this problem on Wayland. There is already a PR to add support of
> fake input events (only the submission side, not capturing) on mutter [2].
>
> I've already have a hacky implementation that lets me move mouse and
> submit keypresses to kwin-wayland from another machine via Barrier. I've
> encountered some architectural difficulties that will need to be solved
> when developing a proper solution so I would like to discuss the path
> forward.
>
> I would like to ask for opinions on whether KWin maintainers even think
> this feature is worthwhile to have from maintenance perspective. If yes,
> to me it looks that the first step forward would be to generalize input
> submission Device class so that we can add libei virtual input devices.
> What do you think about this?
>
> Cheers,
> Povilas
>
> [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei
>
> [2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1436

Do you reckon the portals interface is not enough for your use-case?
https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.html#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop

There's also the fake input protocol, but I wouldn't recommend using it:
https://invent.kde.org/libraries/plasma-wayland-protocols/-/blob/master/src/protocols/fake-input.xml

Aleix