`send-events` setting for keyboard

Hi everyone this is my first post here and I look forward to any responses!

I develop/maintain a gnome extension called Screen Rotate. One of the features users seem interested in is the ability to temporarily disable their touchpad. Which was easily achievable using GIO GSettings and this setting .

Once this was achieved there was the request to be able to temporarily disable keyboard input. Unfortunately this could not be achieved the same way it was for the touchpad feature. there is no send-events setting for the keyboard peripheral schema.

From what I understand just adding the setting to the same schema won’t magically make it work. It needs to be implemented in what I would guess be the GNOME Shell repo.

Does anyone have an idea on how I would go about adding a send-events as a setting but for the keyboard?

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It’s called send-events because of the corresponding libinput setting, if you grep for SEND_EVENTS in the mutter repository you find the hooks where it calls down into libinput to “disable” the keyboard. Simply adding the schema is not enough, you’d have to also implement this in mutter.

And you’d have to multiplex it since libinput works per physical device but the gsettings tend to be per logical type of device (touchpad, keyboard, etc.). So if you want to do something I suggest filing an RFC in the mutter repo so you can get some early information on whether that’s a feature that’s desired there.

Thanks for your reply and the helpfull information Peter!

The following issue has been created in the Mutter repo: Implement `send-events` setting for keyboards in addition to to the existing touchpad implementation (#3738) · Issues · GNOME / mutter · GitLab

Hopefully it is well received.

I think disabling keyboard input should be tightly linked with activating screen keyboard during interactions with text fields.

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