snyball

hawck

C++2019–2024

snyball / hawck

hawck

Key-rebinding daemon for Linux (Wayland/X11/Console)

Systems & Infrastructure Productivity

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5Distinct people

6Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

632GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Key-rebinding daemon for Linux (Wayland/X11/Console)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 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 year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-08-25 14:30:43 UTC to 2024-05-20 06:48:19 UTC.

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.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

6 sources

CynicusRex·May 20, 2024

“I don't really want to deal with all the little annoyances anymore” and “I have zero issues with Windows” does not compute. Or are you running Windows XP/7? I'm running EndevourOS (Arch), KDE Plasma 6 on X11 and rarely have issues. Wayland isn't nice to me though. And as long as XScreenSaver doesn't work on it I likely won't switch. The same for AutoKey, although Hawck seems to be an alternative (https://github.com/snyball/Hawck).

In Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

jagaerglad·Sep 8, 2023

That is actually very smart and helpful, thanks! :) My only gripe with autokey is that it's the only thing holding me back from wayland. Hawck is supposed to work with wayland but I never got it to work, was a while ago I tried though https://github.com/snyball/Hawck

In Unpacking Elixir: Syntax

jagaerglad·Aug 31, 2022Submission

Hawck – Linux AutoKey alternative that also works in Wayland

1 points · Open discussion

shatteredgate·Dec 15, 2021

>Creating a "standardized experience" like Windows usually means that configurability goes right out the window. It's how you get abominations like dconf or the GNOME music player I don't understand how you connected these dots and I'd suggest against calling things abominations. You don't have to use dconf or the GNOME music player, those aren't standardized. If someone does like them I think they're perfectly fine, they do exactly what they're advertised to do and nothing more than that. It's also fine if you don't like them, they're just two options from the many configuration databases and media players that you can choose from. >But why shouldn't I be able to run xbindkeys or sxhkd or whatever hotkey dameon I want? In some ways you actually can but it depends on the hotkey daemon and how it's implemented. The reason for that is techn

Read the rest

ical, those are implemented with X grabs which are an X11-only API and they have a number of usability and security issues. There are a few key rebinding daemons that use evdev directly so they work with both X11 and Wayland, and also on the console: https://github.com/samvel1024/kbct https://github.com/snyball/Hawck But these also do have similar security issues to X key grabs, in that they effectively operate as keyloggers. If you're looking for an API that works purely within Wayland and lets unprivileged clients request key rebinding, that doesn't exist yet. Somebody would need to specify what that API looks like and figure out a good way to make it secure. What would the end goal of the API be, and how could the system (and by extension, the user) tell the difference between a legitimate hotkey daemon and a malicious keylogger? And would it actually be any better than the approach of snooping evdev? I don't know the answer to these questions but you may have more experience with this than I do.

In Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: Touchpad Gestures Now Shipping

slightwinder·May 13, 2020

Oh, right. I knew I forgot something. I use https://github.com/alols/xcape for some while now. It's old, reliable and straight forward, just does it's job. Only downside is that it seems to be limted to X11. Not sure how well it will play with wayland. There are now also some alternative tools, with more ability, which allow overloading just on the side. I have them on my list for a while now, but not done much yet with them. - https://github.com/david-janssen/kmonad - https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail - https://github.com/snyball/Hawck Oh, and for rermapping capslock there are also options with X11. I use setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps to map ctrl to capslock, then overload it with xcape -e "Control_L=Escape;" to add ESC ontop.

In In Praise of AutoHotKey

cycloptic·Aug 25, 2019

In GTK2 and 3, you can switch to the emacs key theme and then edit the files in /usr/share/themes/Emacs/ to have meta instead of ctrl. Alternatively, use a key rebinding daemon like https://github.com/snyball/Hawck to rebind the specific keys globally. Long-term I don't think this is worth it though because the programs are not built to support it like they are on a native Cocoa environment. You kind of just have to suck it up and get used to different key bindings in different environments.

In From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love