Questions[xte](ubuntu)

I have my Logitech G502 mouse with many extra buttons so I wish to be able to hold down a mouse button, use scroll wheel to go through opened windows, release mouse button to select it.

The close keyboard shortcuts I found is Alt+Esc which maps Switch windows directly. To use it, I would hold down Alt button, press Esc repeatedly until desired window is shown, release Alt. An orange frame indicates the selected window.

I have experimented with xte and button sequences but found that they are very unreliable, especially some requires delays to register correctly.

In the end, I found this post and wmctrl which I mapped the single mouse key to this script and it cycled through the windows nicely. However, the way it worked it actually focused on the window thus piling up all the windows on my desktop. I wish to be able to find and select the window first before focusing on it, similar to Alt+Esc.

How can I do that?

I'm trying to bind ctrl+win+p to act as an "UP" arrow key. I'm going to use xbindkeys so first of all I start xbindkeys -k to see the code for this combination. It gives me such an output:

set@set001:~$ xbindkeys -k
Press combination of keys or/and click under the window.
You can use one of the two lines after "NoCommand"
in $HOME/.xbindkeysrc to bind a key.
"(Scheme function)"
    m:0x54 + c:33
    Control+Mod2+Mod4 + p

then I'm using this simple macro in ~/.xbindkeysrc

"xte 'key Up'"
    Control+Mod2+Mod4 + p

but nothing happens when I'm restarting xbindkeys with killall -s1 xbindkeys ; xbindkeys and type ctrl+win+p

all other bindings in ~/.xbindkeysrc working just fine

what am I doing wrong?

I want to bind a different action (for example, using xbindkeys) to the simultaneous clicking of my left and right mouse buttons than I get by clicking the middle button. Is this possible?

I have disabled middle button emulation using xinput:

xinput set-prop  '15' 'libinput Middle Emulation Enabled' 0

(where 15 is the device ID for my mouse)

but xbindkeys does not seem to support actions comprised of two button clicks. For example,

"xte 'key a'"
b:1+b:3

inserts an a even if I just click the right mouse button (button 3 according to xev).

The closest I have come to an answer is this 2016 post, but based on the current (Ubuntu 18.04LTS) man page for xorg.conf the patch does not seem to have ever been merged into xorg.

I have read about using xmodmap to set button mappings, but I haven't found any reference to it allow the definition of a new button code being triggered by simultaneously pressing two buttons.

How can I get this to work?

Following this tutorial, I'd like to map the page-forward button of the mouse (i.e. b:9) to Shift_L. However, using the tools xte and xbinkeys the button-down works, but the button-release does not. Using xte on its own, button-press and -release work. So it has to do something with my ~/.xbindkeys.

Content of ~/.xbindkeys:

# Page forward press
"xte 'keydown Shift_L'"
  b:9

# Page forward release
"xte 'keyup Shift_L'"
  b:9 + Release

xte is part of the xautomation package. After hours of man page reading and looking for documentation or working examples, I still cannot get xte to emulate a Fn-F7 keypress.

xte 'keydown Meta_L' 'key F7' 'keyup Meta_L'

I've tried Meta_L, Meta_R, Multi_key, key F7, keydown F7 then keyup F7. No combination seems to work.

Any idea how I can emulate a combination key press with a Fn key from a command/script?