Track keyboard and mouse usage

skip at pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Tue Jul 18 07:12:38 EDT 2006


    Dennis> Problem: X-Window supports remote displays; you'd need a means
    Dennis> of specifying which display to track (unless you've opened a GUI
    Dennis> application and that application is asking for positions ...

Watch does this via server mode (sort of).  You run watch on both your local
and remote machines.  The remote machine forwards information about mouse
movement to the local machine.

    Dennis> I don't think anyone has ported raw X-protocol access to Python.

There is a (defunct) Xlib wrapper for Python.  Nowadays you could probably
redo just the parts you need pretty easily with ctypes.

    Dennis> * If working raw xt/DECWindows wasn't bad enough... Add GKS
    Dennis> (is that still around?) on top of it -- I had a DECWindows UI
    Dennis> whose [... many magical reminiscences elided ;-) ...]

I believe OpenGL pretty much killed the market for stuff like GKS.  X
servers have enough features and video boards have enough performance that
for all but the most demanding graphics applications there's no desired to
write bits using something other than OpenGL and no need to expose the raw
framebuffer at the application program level.

Skip




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