Bug 473570

Summary:	Allow sending arbitrary keypresses to any chosen application
Product:	[Plasma] kwin	Reporter:	Antti Savolainen <antti.savo>
Component:	wayland-generic	Assignee:	KWin default assignee <kwin-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED INTENTIONAL
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	nate, xaver.hugl
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	5.27.7
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Arch Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Antti Savolainen 2023-08-20 18:32:28 UTC

SUMMARY
Many programs will probably never support the builtin global shortcuts of Plasma. The bridge this gap with programs like OBS, I wish to have an option to send any keypress to an application. As far as I know, hyprland does have already implement this sort of functionality https://wiki.hyprland.org/Configuring/Binds/#global-keybinds

Comment 1 Nate Graham 2023-08-22 21:34:11 UTC

The problem is that this somewhat defeats the Wayland security model and disincentivizes apps to implement the standard protocols. It's a complex topic rife with desktop politics for sure.

What specific use case you you need this for? Start/stop recording in OBS?

Comment 2 Antti Savolainen 2023-08-23 10:34:19 UTC

Yep. Start/Stop OBS while in a fullscreen application for example. Make it so that kwin passes only the keys the user has explicitly specified to the specified program and none else.  

I'm thinking maybe make the functionality a bit more obscure to find. An "Advanced Options" button in the shortcuts menu which only appears if you install and additional package. This way developers will be less likely to start relying on it.

Comment 3 Zamundaaa 2023-08-23 11:06:58 UTC

Making the functionality hard to find just makes it harder for the user while not incentivizing application developers to do the right thing a lot. OBS just needs to implement the global shortcut portal.
Afaict there isn't even an issue for that at https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues, so that would be the first step towards making that happen

Comment 4 Antti Savolainen 2023-08-23 16:21:05 UTC

Alright, thank. I'll go complain to them.

Comment 5 Antti Savolainen 2023-09-29 14:06:55 UTC

I've been lazy, but I finally decided to look into this. OBS keeps their feature requests in a separate location and I found a request for global shortcuts portal here https://ideas.obsproject.com/posts/2066/implement-globalshortcuts-portal

Comment 6 Antti Savolainen 2023-10-26 00:06:01 UTC

For future reference, it seems that a less nuanced way of achieving this already exists in the KDE settings. In Applications -> Legacy X11 App Support you can allow legacy apps to read key inputs. This sadly doesn't allow you to set specific keys as allowed and mouse forward and backward do not get passed.