abcd1234

Well, I've tried to clarify the instructions on the website. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make it, since it's pretty simple to run... and I do expect a certain level of skill, since this is a Unix application. But if you want to set up a separate page, by all means, go for it.

Actually, I'm not convinced portability is really a big deal. xds2key is pure C and quite portable as a result. About the only tricky bit is finding the X11 libraries. 'course, that's easily solved with a really dumb script (or you could get fancy and use autoconf). What a Perl version would bring, however, is greater ease of modification. Combined with all the CPAN modules out there for interfacing with things like XMMS, etc, I could see some interesting applications getting dreamed up. Ha ha, yeah, that's probably overkill, particularly for an app I don't plan to work on any time soon (it works well enough for me, thus that itch is scratched). 'course, that's not to say someone couldn't take over the project and talk to sypherce about hosting. *shrug*

Currently it's just a simplistic interactive app. Turning it into a daemon would be pretty trivial... just need to add a fork around the main app logic and disconnect stdout, stderr, etc. Incidentally, my first instinct was Perl as well, but I couldn't think of a nice, portable way to get at the XTEST protocol without having to require external modules. I've never actually heard of this xtest program you refer to, nor could I find it on the Fedora box I'm in front of or the Debian machine I have at home... must be in some optional package somewhere. Nah, I'm a luddite. Why not just discuss here? I check back frequently enough...

This is just a quick announcement about an X-Windows DS2Key server I've written, aptly named xds2key. This allows X-Windows users, particularly Linux/Unix users (though it works with Cygwin/X, as well), to use DS2Key with, well, any application that takes key presses. Currently, it's quite primitive. It has fixed key mappings, it's pure text mode, etc, and really it was written as a proof-of-concept, but it functions, and I don't intend to work on it too much more. If anyone wants to add to it, though, feel free, as it's released to the public domain. Anyway, you can find it here. Basic compiling/running instructions are there, but there's no fancy schmancy configure script or anything. As for requirements, it just needs an X server that supports the XTEST extension... which encompasses any XFree86 or Xorg-derived server. Not sure about others (eg, Solaris).