Binding keystrokes to keystrokes.

[Bill Case]

I want to find a simple, quick, on the fly, way to bind a series of keystrokes to one keystroke. Below is this moments problem, but I have run into this before so I would like a methodology.

Problem:
FaceBook and other messaging programs remove excess spaces. That is fine for most posts, but occasionally I want to retain my columnar formatting. I am willing to insert a ctl-u unicode formula for space or tab if such can be found. I know I can send my data as an image, but I am looking for something that is quick and dirty that I can use on the fly. U+00a0 seems to solve my initial problem.

Now I would like to bind <ctrl><shift>u00a0 <space> to one key and have it execute. -- <mod4, or Super, or Win>+SPACE would be nice, but any combination will do. How do I do this?

[furrycat]

You can use xmacroplay. Some window managers will let you bind arbitrary keypresses to run commands (eg xmacroplay) but an alternative is to run xbindkeys in the background to listen for the keypress you want and have it launch xmacroplay to send the keys.

One gotcha is that the keys you use in your xbindkeys trigger are still classed as pressed when your script runs so either you will have to do a sleep or have your script release the trigger key(s) first.

Here I tell xbindkeys to call xmacroplay on the mao script when I press XF86Launch6 (which happens to be what xev told me was the result of pressing F15 on my Apple keyboard).

$ cat ~/.xbindkeysrc
"xmacroplay $DISPLAY < ~/.xbindkeys/mao"
  XF86Launch6

Here's the script:

$ cat ~/.xbindkeys/mao
KeyStrRelease XF86Launch6
KeyStrPress Control_L
KeyStrPress Shift_L
KeyStr U
KeyStrRelease Shift_L
KeyStrRelease Control_L
KeyStr 8
KeyStr C
KeyStr 9
KeyStr 3
KeyStr space

And I run

xbindkeys

Here's a magic cat to prove it works:

貓

By the way, xmacroplay is ancient and probably won't compile without help. I have an almost-equally-ancient binary kicking around but to recompile it on my Fedora 15 machine I had to create config.h with

#define HAVE_IOSTREAM
using namespace std;

then modify all g++ lines in the Makefile to include

-DHAVE_CONFIG

Maybe your vendor has a package which will save you the hassle.