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baskerville
sxhkd
C2016–2024
baskerville / sxhkd

sxhkd

Simple X hotkey daemon

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10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Simple X hotkey daemon

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-03-14 06:52:19 UTC to 2024-05-23 18:15:30 UTC.

01232016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
autoexec·May 23, 2024
Notepad++ will work with wine, and there's https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext Google says there are options for autohotkey too, although some are works in progress: https://github.com/Paris/IronAHK / https://github.com/poa00/ahk.keysharp/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://linux.die.net/man/7/xautomation http://sikulix.com/ https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11 https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd
In WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics
bsnnkv·Apr 15, 2022
komorebi dev here. I can't tell you the number of times I've wanted to just write my own take on sxhkd[1] for Windows and use that to manage my own keybindings for komorebi instead of ahk. You can just as easily write your own/use another hotkey daemon or PowerShell scripts to handle komorebi's configuration and keybindings, in that sense there is no dependency on ahk at all. However, the inertia around ahk in the Windows ecosystem is undeniable and it's in the interests of making adoption and onboarding easier that the project provides example ahk files and has invested in an ahk code generation library. My thoughts on the dominant hotkey daemon in the Windows ecosystem aside, I remain convinced that the famous bspwm socket communication architecture[2] is the best way to handle both configuration and keybindings for a tiling window mana
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ger that has been proposed to this day. Unfortunately I have to concede that there is a certain configuration burden that comes with komorebi, which is amplified in some cases by having to write/maintain ahk. This configuration burden is largely due to the highly fragmented nature of Windows application development that is discussed often on HN and it is inescapable. With this in mind, the next release of komorebi (currently available on master) will invest even more heavily in automatic configuration generation. A separate repository of common application-specific configuration tweaks[3] (in YAML!) has been created which I and others from the komorebi Discord server are contributing to, with the goal of having the edge cases for as many applications as possible fully documented so that a comprehensive configuration file can be generated[4] for the user which ensures that every (major) Windows application behaves as expected under a tiling window manager. I hope that other Windows tiling window manager developers can use these YAML definitions in the future to handle the same edge cases in their projects so that eventually there will be a tiling window manager of every flavour (bspwm, i3wm etc.) available for Windows users where having to manually accommodate and compensate for the non-standard behaviour of individual applications is a thing of the past. [1]: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd [2]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm#description [3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-application-specific-conf... [4]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/#generating-common-applic...
In Show HN: A tiling window manager like i3wm written entirely in C#
imiric·Dec 16, 2020
My favorite WM! I've been using it for years now, after trying i3, herbstluft, xmonad, qtile and a bunch of others. It's very lightweight and highly customizable. The configuration file is just a shell script of bspc (client) commands. It doesn't handle keybindings on its own, but leverages another awesome tool by the same author: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd Which also simply calls bspc, but can be used for generic hotkeys as well. It's just an awesomely simple pair of tools that work great, stay out of my way, are rock solid and well maintained. Pure gems of the open source world. Please consider donating to support the author: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/blob/master/doc/CONTRIB... (I have no affiliation, just a very happy user.) This WM is the only thing besides habit keeping me from switching to Wayland. Though I gues
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s I could get used to Sway.
In bspwm: tiling window manager that represents windows as leaves of a binary tree
imiric·Nov 4, 2017
Some tiling window managers work this way without any issues. Bspwm[0], for instance, uses a client CLI program (bspc) to send commands to the daemon and alter its configuration at runtime. In fact, it doesn't have a configuration file format at all, since it can be configured via a simple shell script that runs a sequence of bspc commands. It also doesn't have any key binding functionality and offloads this to a separate program, sxhkd[1], whose only purpose is to interpret key presses and execute shell commands. Since this is bspwm's interface, the two work seamlessly together, even though they're not dependent on each other at all. This is just brilliant design, and speaks volumes for the "do one thing and do it well" school of thought. For the record, I've been using both programs without a single issue for the past 3 years at least,
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and it's been one of the most stable and least problematic systems I've ever used, and use to this day. So just wanted to offer an opposing personal experience (anecdotal, to be sure) regarding your brittleness concerns with this interface. [0]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm [1]: https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd
In Command line interfaces are reified UIs
exDM69·Jul 26, 2016
I used DWM and derivatives (Awesome, etc) for some time but I didn't enjoy the automatic layouts. The split between primary and secondary areas felt clumsy to me. I recently switched over to bspwm [0], and I really like it. Instead of automatic layouts, all areas can be split horizontally or vertically (similar to e.g. vim or tmux windowing). The layout tree can be manipulated in various ways, but the only on I use is rotate (ie. change vertical split to horizontal or vice versa). I don't have any status bars or launchers. It's not all good, though. Just recently the config syntax changed and it was somewhat annoying to upgrade my old config to the new syntax, albeit the new syntax is much better. Hopefully it stabilizes soon. It's also split in a funny way, so that bspwm only manages windows. It doesn't even listen to the keyboard, but t
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ypically uses another app (sxhkd [1]) for listening to the keyboard and launching a process (bspc) to control the wm. This is elegant and unix-ey but responsiveness suffers under heavy load. On the other hand, it's not tied together with a scripting language like e.g. Awesome is bound to Lua and XMonad to Haskell, which is nice. Status bars and launchers are done with external apps but I don't use any at the moment. I do miss a desktop activity indicator a little, though (tint2 didn't work out of the box with bspwm, lemonbar was too hacky for my taste). [0] https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm [1] https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd
In A dynamic window manager for X11 written with Node.js
dmix·May 27, 2016
Is there a short summary of the features/value prop for each? The slides/video are a bit long and detailed. A simple overview and link to Github makes a good pitch. Curious how it compares to [1] bspwm and [2] sxchd? Which offers a minimal tiling window manager and daemon controlling keyboard shortcuts. Each has a small C codebase that's simple and easy to understand, unlike most other tiling WM. The config is excellent too and integrates well with [3] xmobar for a very clean and lightweight desktop, well suited for ArchLinux. [1] https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm [2] https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd [3] https://github.com/jaor/xmobar
In I wrote a display server, a desktop environment, and a debugging/reversing tool

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