Disclaimer

this is chri-k's fork of waycrate/swhkd. it intended for chri-k's own use. it is expected to diverge from upstream, and is renamed to make this more explicit. it is only tested on Arch.

ckswhkd will be maintained so long as chri-k continues using it.

at fork time the original swhkd appears to be abandoned and is not effectively functional on Arch.

CKSWHKD

ckswhkd is a hotkey daemon for Wayland, inspired by sxhkd.

ckswhkd works by directly intercepting device events, and is thus is protocol-independent, and will even work in a TTY.

the original swhkd claims to be a drop-in replacement for sxhkd, however that is not true.

Installation and Building

Installation and building instructions can be found here.

do not expect chri-k to fix issues that are not reproducible on Arch.

Running

the main daemon ckswhkd must be running as root. a separate process ckswhks is used to obtain the actual user's environment. to start ckswhkd:

ckswhks && sudo ckswhkd

or alternatively, make ckswhkd a setuid binary:

sudo chown root:root ckswhkd
sudo chmod u+s ckswhkd

then to start,

ckswhks && ckswhkd

Runtime signals

A running ckswhkd can be controlled through signals:

• sudo pkill -USR1 ckswhkd — Pause key checking
• sudo pkill -USR2 ckswhkd — Resume key checking
• sudo pkill -HUP ckswhkd — Reload config file

Configuration

the configuration of ckswhkd is similar to sxhkd More information about the sxhkd syntax can be found in ckswhkd(5)

The default configuration file is in ~/.config/ckswhkd/ckswhkdrc with a fallback to etc/ckswhkd/ckswhkdrc.

If you use Vim, you can get the original swhkd config syntax highlighting with the swhkd-vim plugin. Install it in vim-plug with Plug 'waycrate/swhkd-vim'. chri-k will eventually fork that too to account for syntax changes.

All supported key and modifier names are listed in man 5 ckswhkd-keys.

Environment Variables

The environment variables are now sourced using the ckswhks binary, running in the background which are then supplemented to the command that is to be run, thus emulating the environment variables in the default shell.

The commands are executed via SHELL -c 'command', hence the environment is sourced from the default shell. If the user wants to use a different set of environment variables, they can set the environment variables in the default shell or export the environment variables within a logged in instance of their shell before running the ckswhks binary.

Autostart

To autostart ckswhkd you can do one of two things

1. Add the commands from the "Running" section to your window managers configuration file.
2. Enable the service file for your respective init system. Currently, only a systemd service file exists.

Security

We use a server-client model to keep you safe. The daemon (ckswhkd — privileged process) is responsible for listening to key events and running shell commands. The server (ckswhks — non-privileged process) is responsible for keeping a track of the environment variables and sending them to the daemon. The daemon uses these environment variables while running the shell commands. The daemon only runs shell commands that have been parsed from the config file and there is no way to run arbitrary shell commands (so long as the config file does not allow arbitrary shell commands to be run). The server is responsible for only sending the environment variables to the daemon and nothing else. This separation of responsibilities ensures security.