Pass through of certain keys while 'grabbed' in effect?

[lmarso]

I tried to (in effect) exempt a couple of keys (pageUp/pageDown) from the grabbed state, which would include:

• pass through to system input
• press registered even when releases ignored and multiple presses of other keys already in the "pressed but not released" register
• not adding self to the "pressed but not released" register

Couldn't get there. Can explain what I tried, if that's helpful. But if there's a well defined path to achieve this, I'd appreciate an explanation here.

[thkala]

The issue here is that grabbing an input device is a single ioctl() and is handled completely in the kernel. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to selectively grab part of a device, or exempt certain events.

The only alternative I can see would be to inject the exempted events back into the input subsystem using uinput. This would have to be handled from within actkbd, as it should only happen when the device is grabbed, to avoid duplicating events.

I'm afraid that would be a non-trivial change in actkbd, and I simply do not have the time to work on it myself in the near future...

[lmarso]

I had thought there would be a workaround using key(x) and rel(x).

You might want to clarify in the docs that key(x), rel(x) and rep(x) are inoperable when state is "grabbed", which appears to be the case?

• `key(X)': Send a key X press event to the input layer of the system.
• `rel(X)': Send a key X release event to the input layer of the system.
• `rep(X)': Send a key X repeat event to the input layer of the system.