Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by openmarkand 700 days ago
That does not make sense, wayland and xorg are fundamentally different. in X11 everything is global given that its the X.Org server that manages clients while the wayland compositor does most of the X.Org server by itself. This is also why writing a pure wayland compositor from scratch is much harder as you need to rewrite half of the X.Org server but at the same time in contrast to X11 you don't have security holes like a keylogger in few lines of code. In short, xdotool relies on the X11 protocol while a similar wayland app need a support in the compositor itself.

There is some attempts though like: https://github.com/atx/wtype

1 comments

I don't think that's inherently true; what would prevent someone making a wayland compositor that implemented the X11 protocols for interacting with other windows?

> There is some attempts though like: https://github.com/atx/wtype

I am aware of several of these attempts; so far they all fall flat precisely because wayland compositors tend to not provide enough API surface to actually recreate xdotool et al. entirely (ex. wtype will always blindly type into whatever window is active, it can't provide xdotool's --window option to pick where keystrokes are going).