autokey

2 Articles

Linux Fu: Stopping A Runaway

April 14, 2025 by 33 Comments

The best kind of Hackaday posts are the ones where there was some insurmountable problem with an elegant solution devised through deep analysis of the problem and creativity. This is not one of those posts. I’m sure you are familiar with bit rot. You know, something works for a long time and then, for no apparent reason, stops working. Well, that has been biting me, and lacking the time for the creative, elegant solution, I decided to attack it with a virtual chainsaw.

It all started with a 2022 Linux Fu about using autokey.

The Problem

I use autokey to give me emacs-style keystrokes in Web browsers and certain other programs. It intercepts keystrokes and translates them into other keystrokes. The problem is, the current Linux community hates autokey. Well, that’s not strictly true. They just love Wayland more. One reason I won’t switch from X11 is that I haven’t found a way to do something like I do with autokey. But since most of the powers-that-be have decided that X11 is bad and Wayland is good, X11 development is starting to show cracks.

In particular, autokey isn’t in the normal repositories for my distro anymore (KDE Neon). Of course, I’ve installed the latest version myself. I’m perfectly capable of doing that or even building from source. But lately, I’ve noticed my computer hangs, especially after sleeping for a long time. Also, after a long time, I notice that autokey just quits working. It is running but not working and I have to restart it. The memory consumption seems high when this happens. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Stopping A Runaway” →

Linux Fu: The Browser Emacs Fusion

July 6, 2022 by 20 Comments

It is no secret that I have a few things permanently burned into my neurons: the 1802 instruction set, the commands for WordStar, and the commands for emacs. There was a time when emacs was almost my operating system. With no X11, emacs gave you a way to have a shell in one window, check your mail, and keep your work open.

I still use emacs a lot (although I’ve been getting more and more pleased with vscode with an emacs keybinding extension). But I also spend a lot of time — like right now — writing in a Web browser. Especially if I’m writing about code, it gets hard to remember which set of keys you have to use and I’ve wanted to do something about it for a long time. The answer is a very cool program called Autokey. (You can download my files for it, but you probably want to read more first.) It probably doesn’t work if you have switched to Wayland, but it can do a lot for you ranging from saving you some typing to reprogramming your favorite program to have different keystrokes. However, it isn’t without its problems, and I’ll tell you what I know about it.

The Value Proposition

Autokey sits in your system tray and it watches what you type. In its most simple usage, you can set up different phrases to substitute what you type.

For example, I might reprogram HaD to show up as Hackaday to save myself some typing. I usually use some odd character at the start or end so I don’t accidentally trigger things. So maybe I’m tired of typing or mistyping http://www.hackaday.com. I could set up ~had to automatically type the correct URL for me.

Continue reading “Linux Fu: The Browser Emacs Fusion” →