A next-generation hotkey daemon for Wayland/X11 written in Rust.

SWHKD

Simple Wayland HotKey Daemon

swhkd is a display protocol-independent hotkey daemon made in Rust. swhkd uses an easy-to-use configuration system inspired by sxhkd, so you can easily add or remove hotkeys.

It also attempts to be a drop-in replacement for sxhkd, meaning your sxhkd config file is also compatible with swhkd.

Because swhkd can be used anywhere, the same swhkd config can be used across Xorg or Wayland desktops, and you can even use swhkd in a TTY.

Installation and Building

Installation and building instructions can be found here.

Running

swhks &
pkexec swhkd

Runtime signals

After opening swhkd, you can control the program through signals:

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

Configuration

swhkd closely follows sxhkd syntax, so most existing sxhkd configs should be functional with swhkd.

The default configuration file is in /etc/swhkd/swhkdrc. If you don't like having to edit the file as root every single time, you can create a symlink from ~/.config/swhkd/swhkdrc to /etc/swhkd/swhkdrc.

If you use Vim, you can get swhkd config syntax highlighting with the swhkd-vim plugin. Install it in vim-plug with Plug 'waycrate/swhkd-vim'.

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

Autostart

To autostart swhkd 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 systemd and OpenRC service files exist and more will be added soon including Runit.

Security

We use a server-client model to keep you safe. The daemon (swhkd — privileged process) communicates to the server (swhks — running as non-root user) after checking for valid keybindings. Since the daemon is totally separate from the server, no other process can read your keystrokes. As for shell commands, you might be thinking that any program can send shell commands to the server and that's true! But the server runs the commands as the currently logged-in user, so no extra permissions are provided (This is essentially the same as any app on your desktop calling shell commands).

So yes, you're safe!

Support

1. https://matrix.to/#/#waycrate-tools:matrix.org
2. https://discord.gg/KKZRDYrRYW

Contributors

Supporters:

1. @CluelessTechnologist