> Why would you ever let a non-focused application subscribe to any key combinations?
* Media playback controls
* Hotkeys to take screnshots, or record videos
* Quake style terminals
* Ingame chat and game invites
* Color pickers
* Screen controls like F.lux
* Window management hotkeys
* Push-to-Talk in group voice calls
And that's just what I personally use on my own machine.
It's a massive security issue that any installed software can listen to any input activity or view/affect other windows, and that does need to be reigned in. But to claim that there's no legitimate utility to global hotkeys is absurd. We need robust permissions, not a completely crippled experience.
It doesn't even need to be installed. Back in the 90's, some Unix workstations shipped with X11 security disabled by default. Your keyboard could be sniffed just by plugging into the network. Fun times.
In my experience most of these use cases are handled on linux by the window manager calling a script that sends a message to the relevant application, e.g. over dbus.
Some applications prefer to provide a ui for the user to configure a hotkey. This is naturally discoverable within the scope of the other settings in its preferences screen.
Providing a cli interface for automation or binding a hotkey is imo more powerful and useful but its not discoverable. Doubly so for a controlling it over dbus.
The logical thing is that since there is a substantial use case and a desire to limit applications access to global info is that a permission system ought to have been built into Wayland such that applications could request not only global access to the keyboard but permission to get a notification when a particular key press happened.
Since this feature was a staple of desktop operating systems for decades it ought to have been part of the plan from the start.
People have been asking for similar grab-type things since early on in Wayland, and there have been many proposals, but nobody has actually stepped forward to build such a permission system that would work everywhere and would not create additional security problems or would not severely overcomplicate things. It's not a simple thing to do, by any means. If you think you know how, I would urge you to get started designing it and contributing it to some of the major Wayland implementations.
I don't really want to be in the business of growing wheat or baking bread if what I actually want is a sandwich but I will happily explain why ___ sandwich shack is doing it wrong because Monday morning quarterbacking is more fun.
* Media playback controls
* Hotkeys to take screnshots, or record videos
* Quake style terminals
* Ingame chat and game invites
* Color pickers
* Screen controls like F.lux
* Window management hotkeys
* Push-to-Talk in group voice calls
And that's just what I personally use on my own machine.
It's a massive security issue that any installed software can listen to any input activity or view/affect other windows, and that does need to be reigned in. But to claim that there's no legitimate utility to global hotkeys is absurd. We need robust permissions, not a completely crippled experience.