xdotool wont work in i3wm when bound to a key - keyboard

I have made a script where it uses xdotool to do some keyboard inputs.
You can find the script here (The script is called pop_mpv.sh).
The script works perfectly when I run it from a terminal, but it does not work properly when I have the script bound to a key.
This is what I put into my i3 config:
bindsym --release $mod+p exec bash ~/bin/pop_mpv.sh
According to the i3wm user guide, I have to use --release because I am using xdotool.
https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#keybindings
I tried what suggested in this question, but it did not work.
EDIT I forgot to add to script that you need xclip for it run

Your script and i3wm keybinding all look correct. It's strange. When I put sleep 1 before executing bash script. It suddenly works...
bindsym --release $mod+p exec "sleep1; ~/bin/pop_mpv.sh"

Related

how to start the neovim gio from the cli

I'm trying to switch from vim/gvim to neovim on Linux. Up to now my standard workflow started with opening the cli, navigate to my project directory, and run gvim <filename> with the file I intend to start working with.
With neovim I can start it from the KDE menu to get a nice GUI. according to the menu settings, it simply runs nvim with an optional filename parameter. But I don't find the way to run nvim from the cli in a way, that it starts the GUI. Running nvim <filename> simply starts the cli UI.
Google gave me a lot of interesting information, but not, what I'm looking for.
There are different GUIs for neovim. Check which one do you actually use and start it from the command line. Navigate to the KDE menu for neovim GUI, right-click on it and select Edit application... Go to the Application tab and check the Command edit box. There you'll see the actual command which is run by KDE when you select the corresponding menu item. You can create your own shell script or alias which will run this command and use it on the command line.
UPDATE
Maybe some parameter or environment variable is passed to nvim so it changes its behavior. You can try to see what system call KDE actually performs to start the editor. For example, I'm using KDE plasma, so pidof plasmashell gives me the pid which I need. Then:
strace -f -v -e trace=execve -p `pidof plasmashell` &> plasma.trace
After that go to KDE menu and start neovim. Terminate the strace command with Ctrl-C and check the plasma.trace file for the execve system calls made to start the neovim process.

linux "enable -n xxx" command works in terminal but not when put into a script

I've found a very strange issue, when in linux terminal I type "enable -n trap", it would disable the trap linux builtin command. But if I put it into a script like
#!/bin/bash
enable -n trap
and then run the script, there's no error but the command is also not disabled. Really appreciate if someone could share what is happening and how to run it in some file instead of directly in the terminal. Thank you!
The enable command only affects the current shell. When you run a script, that script is executed in a new process, so:
A new shell starts
The enable command runs and disables the trap command in that shell
The shell exits
If you want to affect the current shell, your only option is to source the script using the . (or source) command. If the script is named disable-trap.sh and is in your $PATH, you can run:
. disable-trap.sh
You can also provide a full path to the script:
. /path/to/disable-trap.sh
Sourcing a script like this is largely equivalent to typing the same commands in at the command line: it executes the instructions in the script in the current shell, rather than spawning a new process.

How to use xdotool to open a new tab, switch to it and run commands in it

I am trying to write a bash script to automate running some commands. However some of these commands should be running in their own terminal tab.
So I use the following in my bash script to open a new tab:
xdotool key ctrl+shift+t
this does the job, but the next commands in my bash script are still executed in the previous terminal tab.
How can I make the new opened terminal tab active and run the next commands in this tab?
What Terminal Emulator are you using? It strongly depends on this.
In general, you could write the commands you want to execute in a shell script and tell your terminal emulator to execute the script once it has started.
Example with xterm:
echo '#!/bin/bash' > /tmp/thescript
echo 'ls -la' >> /tmp/thescript
chmod +x /tmp/thescript
xterm -hold -e /tmp/thescript
EDIT: I just saw that u asked for a way to achieve this with xdotool. So this answer might be invalid. Please tell me if so - then i'll delete it.
How are you using xdotool? It can be done with a chain, for example:
$ xdotool key "ctrl+shift+t"; xdotool type "ls"; xdotool key Return
If all you want is to run the commands in the background / in parallel, without synchronously waiting for each command to complete before the next begins, terminate them with an ampersand & to instruct the shell to do so.
Alternatively, you can execute the commands in their own subshells by surrounding each with parentheses ( ). If they are long running processes or you do not wish to pollute the original shell with their output, you can fork them off and capture their output to file with something like (setsid command 1>/path/to/log &).
If separate tabs is necessary requirement, you can use xdotool to key the switch-to-the-next-tab binding or similar, and then key the commands you must run in that tab.
Instead of sorting out that mess yourself, you could use a script from this answer by Jacob Vlijm, which wraps a windowed approach that uses xdotool and wmctrl to 'send' commands to different terminal windows. The script is written in python 3 but it can easily be rewritten for a shell environment of choice.
A more direct approach involves use of a TIOCSTI ioctl to inject characters into another terminal. According to the tty_ioctl manual page:
NAME
ioctl_tty - ioctls for terminals and serial lines
...
DESCRIPTION
The ioctl(2) call for terminals and serial ports accepts many possible
command arguments.
...
Faking input
TIOCSTI const char *argp
Insert the given byte in the input queue
...
Here are c and perl wrappers, and an example in python as referenced by this answer.

Linux (Raspbian) - Running script at login(auto) and keeping window in foreground for interaction

I have tried everything to make this work. login scripts, LXDE-pi autostart, cron task #reboot, init.d, and I cannot get my script running with a terminal window running in the foreground so that I can interact with it. I can get it to run but only in background. Is there any way I can get a script that simply runs: "python /home/pi/myscript.py" at startup and leaves the terminal window open with the script running for my keyboard inputs? I would rather not use the /dev/input/event if at all possible. Thanks
Simply running python /home/pi/myscript.py at startup will run your script without any terminal. So there is no window that can be kept open. The behavior you want can be achieved by starting an terminal application and let it execute your script.
e. g. using xterm:
xterm -e "python /home/pi/myscript.py"
or lxterminal:
lxterminal --command "python /home/pi/myscript.py"
I was missing a simple flag.. what I did was edit ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart with
#lxterminal -e /home/pi/autoscript.sh
and in that file, I added
cd /home/pi/
python -i 2Trackmain.py
I wasn't using the -i flag, so every time I pressed Enter to move through the interactive py script, it exited the terminal, using -i will keep the window open for your interaction. And I only had to add the change directory part b/c the script called other scripts in the same directory.

Screen and Cygwin: no tab completion?

I'm having some problems working with my development environment. Specifically, after I invoke the screen utility from within Cygwin I lose the ability to do tab completion. Before I invoke screen however tab completion works just fine.
I messed around with setting different values for the TERM env variable (VT100, xterm etc) but without success. It must be something trivial but I have no idea anymore. Does StackOverflow have any suggestions for me?
when you issue 'screen' from inside cygwin it might put you in another shell like /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash (and bash is where you're getting the tab completion from).
To fix the problem you could edit your .screenrc file (found in your home directory) and add in this line:
shell bash
Then try running screen again and you should see tab completion work within this new window.
The problem is that bash needs to be run as a login shell in order to have tab completion in the default cygwin setup. If you run bash in a cygwin bash you won’t have tab completion either. To set screen to run bash in login mode, add this line to your ~/.screenrc file:
shell -bash
I had a similar problem with git autocompletion not working when using screen on a linux machine, but wasn't due to a different shell. I fixed it using this question: Git autocomplete in screen on mac os and doing the following:
Get the git autocompletion script
curl https://raw.github.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -OL
why would you want that hanging around?
mv git-completion.bash .git-completion.bash
add this line to your ./bashrc
source ~/.git-completion.bash
Then in your terminal
source ~/.bashrc
That worked for me.
(I imagine after three years you've probably solved your problem, but I hope this helps someone else)

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