Feature request: action accepting an arbitrary string handled by user-written code

[jtroo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Have a mechanism for people willing to write Rust code to easily add their own desired behaviours without needing to know too much about the keyberon library or the kanata processing loop.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Add a new list action (custom-behaviour "whatever string you want").

kanata/parser/src/cfg/mod.rs

Line 1271 in 634ed97

fn parse_action_list(ac: &[SExpr], s: &ParsedState) -> Result<&'static KanataAction> {

Add a new custom action CustomBehaviour(String)

kanata/parser/src/custom_action.rs

Line 12 in 634ed97

pub enum CustomAction {

Add handling for press and release of CustomBehaviour. Define easy-to-find functions that accept the string defined in CustomBehaviour, which would be where users can add their code. Probably makes sense to put in a new file. Custom behaviour will be stringly typed 🧵.

kanata/src/kanata/mod.rs

Line 918 in 634ed97

match custom_event {

Add some documentation for how to interact with OS and read layout state.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

A user could certainly write their own code using llhook/evdev to do custom behaviours. But since kanata already has a lot of nice built-in behaviours that work mostly-fine out of the box, it might be nice to fork and extend kanata and add that little bit extra that's missing.

Though perhaps cmd is already a sufficient mechanism for this... ?

Additional context

N/A

[jtroo]

This wouldn't be all that hard to implement, but I wonder if anyone would use it 😅

[jtroo]

This is an interesting potential integration too:
https://github.com/mattwparas/steel

[eugenesvk]

By the way, what about making these shareable/plugin-like so you could use someone else's custom action?

Alternatively, is something less obscure than steel and more polyglot like, e.g., some kind of wasm custom action runtime feasible for an app like kanata?

Also

Though perhaps cmd is already a sufficient mechanism for this... ?

cmd flashes console windows when used with simple scripting commands with a gui app, which is rather disruptive