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01AutoMonkey
Asked: 2025-01-13 19:56:09 +0800 CST

How to disable/enable keyboard/mouse (input devices) on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Wayland?

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I need a cli command to disable input devices (keyboard and mouse), as well as a command to enable them again.

To disable input devices on Xorg it's: xinput float <id#>, and to enable them it's xinput reattach <id#>, but I'm on Wayland, how to do it there?

keyboard

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There may be other methods depending on what desktop you are using, but for any of them you should be able to use evtest -grab on an input device. This program intercepts all events coming from the device (for debugging), and the grab option stops the events going any further. The program has to stay running, and when it is killed the events will once again pass on to Wayland.

    You can find the name of the mouse and keyboard by looking through the output of commands

    libinput list-devices
ls -l /dev/input/*/*{kbd,mouse}

    For example, I have

    /dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Optical_Mouse-event-mouse -> ../event6
/dev/input/by-id/usb-05f3_0007-event-kbd -> ../event2

    so I would need to do

    evtest -grab /dev/input/event2 >/dev/null &
evtest -grab /dev/input/event6 >/dev/null &

    and then kill these processes to regain control.

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