Future of Autokey #909
Replies: 8 comments 5 replies
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Some side topics: Qt vs GTK - maintaining two GUI frontends is a bit excessive and again adds to the development workload for pushing out changes which we should seek to minimize Separating the Frontend from the Service - Ideally the service should be able to run independently of the frontend. I think separating this out would also reduce complexity overall. Long term if wayland support gets implement as I've been doing it this would also allow separation/security as we could grant a |
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Thanks for both posts, as I am sure that these matters have crossed the minds of all committed Autokey users. I feel that with our current resources, the best course of action is to update the most used GUI. Personally, I don't care which GUI, because I am comfortable with either Qt or GTK. This philosophy also applies to X-Windows and Wayland. I would like to see a single Autokey version working seamlessly for everyone and help others to upgrade to this single version. |
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I know how it is juggling work/life stuff with contributing to projects. We always appreciate any time you're able to give to AutoKey.
Wayland definitely needs to happen, since at least some distributions are configuring themselves to use it by default now even though they still offer Xorg. I don't think it should happen over (or at the expense of) Xorg. Until Xorg is completely deprecated, it should remain available to those of us who choose to use it, especially since some of us have never tried Wayland and some issues with Wayland cannot yet be resolved, so folks are sometimes told to go back to Xorg for the time being.
The Desktop Linux distributions section of this Wikipedia page lists six distributions that use Wayland by default now, and they're some big names. Also, this YouTube video is my favorite for learning about Wayland and for seeing why it's inevitable that we must all end up using it.
Six so far in that article linked up there, but there could be more.
You're an absolute hero for taking this on. ❤️
I don't fully understand that, but since you do, it sounds good. Any integration that's possible would probably be appreciated by those who use Wayland. |
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As long as it stays an "experimental" branch, that's a good idea. The big deal would be keeping the Wayland code isolated somehow so that changes from develop can be merged into this new branch with minimal effort. We're doing too many multiple branch changes already. |
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Qt vs GTK: If it comes down to a choice between them, my vote is for GTK, because that Qt editor is impossible to use. |
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If we can swap kate-part for Qscintilla, all of that might change. |
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I agree in principle with having one front end, but each one has a few things it does better than the other one. We seem to have had devs who were knowledgeable enough to work on the GTK front end, but not so much for the Qt one. The edit panel is almost totally different between them (GTK is much better) and the panel icon works differently (Qt is better). In previous discussions, you said there was a feature you don't use (but I do) that doesn't work on Wayland. I don't remember which one it was. I don't think it was the mouse. I haven't gotten around to filing a feature request yet, but it would be great if a real editor could be plugged into AutoKey. Kate is built to allow that, but everyone has their own favorite editor. This would improve whichever front end we choose. |
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I believe Bluedrink9 did a bunch of refactoring that made it into 0.96.0 that started doing that. It will also remove duplicated code. Wayland/X11 - X11 will probably need to be supported for quite a while yet because not everyone will adopt Wayland and we don't want to lose those users. |
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Based on this discussion, I think the way forward would be to rewrite Xautomtion for Wayland (if possible) and write a fancy front end for capturing and managing tiny screenshots of features on the screen to search for. Then ydotool or dotool can be used for keyboard and mouse events without us writing our own. This sounds like it would work nicely, but it would be a lot of work to design and implement. |
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My silence was because either versions work well for me. But, my preference is GTK. As for X11 and Wayland, I support any effort to gain a wider audience for Autokey. P.S: @josephj11, I changed my email address because the previous one was hacked. while Google One was rolled out. I also lost your email address, when several data disks were damaged unintentionally. Needless to say it was an expensive year. To connect with me, go to Wikipedia/Commons/Wikisource, find User:Ineuw and send me an email. The email link is accessible through one of the links on the left of my user home page. I will reply their system is secure and send you my new email address. |
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Tried to send you message there. Hopefully you got it. |
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Yes. I just saw it. Thanks |
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Been busy for a bit with work/life stuff. But I'll try to commit more time to the project moving forward.
I'd like to open this thread as a discussion of the best way to move forward with the project in general. Should we commit to wayland over X11? Is there any data to backup that is the way things are going? Do we know how many distros are currently shipping wayland as default over x11?
The feature set of autokey is pretty wide which makes implementing it on a new windowing server an undertaking I've underestimated 3-4 times now.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we should get an MVP wayland release (like just the
keyboardandwindowlibraries implemented, the mouse interface is what's stopping progress currently) and just throw up a disclaimer that it's not currently 100% done.Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?
@josephj11 @Elliria @BlueDrink9 @ineuw
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