this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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What's autokey?
It's roughly equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows. It's an application that can intercept key combos or even typed strings and...do basically anything. Let's say you type a certain phrase a lot, you could come up with an abbreviation so that when you type an abbreviation it deletes the abbreviation and inserts the big thing you type. Or maybe you want it to fire when you press ALT+ y. Or, maybe you want it to do something programmatic, like insert the date and time. Or do anything you can get Python to do.
This apparently does not work on Wayland systems, something about the way it accessed keystrokes in X11 isn't open in Wayland for security concerns.
I don't know autokey, so I can't speak to whether they replace all its functionality but there are 'xdotool-like' programs for Wayland. So it is at least very possible to replace functionality like the latter you mentioned (press button/button combination -> do an action, like inserting date/start a program/do something programmatic). Some examples I know are:
ydotool is a perfect replacement for dmenu based password managers.