A next-generation hotkey daemon for Wayland/X11 written in Rust.
Simple Wayland HotKey Daemon
swhkd is a display protocol-independent hotkey daemon made in
Rust. swhkd uses an easy-to-use configuration
system inspired by sxhkd, so you can easily add or remove hotkeys.
It also attempts to be a drop-in replacement for sxhkd, meaning your sxhkd
config file is also compatible with swhkd.
Because swhkd can be used anywhere, the same swhkd config can be used across
Xorg or Wayland desktops, and you can even use swhkd in a TTY.
Installation and building instructions can be found here.
swhks &
pkexec swhkdAfter opening swhkd, you can control the program through signals:
sudo pkill -USR1 swhkd— Pause key checkingsudo pkill -USR2 swhkd— Resume key checkingsudo pkill -HUP swhkd— Reload config file
swhkd closely follows sxhkd syntax, so most existing sxhkd configs should
be functional with swhkd.
The default configuration file is in /etc/swhkd/swhkdrc. If you don't like
having to edit the file as root every single time, you can create a symlink from
~/.config/swhkd/swhkdrc to /etc/swhkd/swhkdrc.
If you use Vim, you can get swhkd config syntax highlighting with the
swhkd-vim plugin. Install it in
vim-plug with Plug 'waycrate/swhkd-vim'.
All supported key and modifier names are listed in man 5 swhkd-keys.
- Add the commands from the "Running" section to your window managers configuration file.
- Enable the service file for your respective init system. Currently, only systemd and OpenRC service files exist and more will be added soon including Runit.
We use a server-client model to keep you safe. The daemon (swhkd — privileged
process) communicates to the server (swhks — running as non-root user) after
checking for valid keybindings. Since the daemon is totally separate from the
server, no other process can read your keystrokes. As for shell commands, you
might be thinking that any program can send shell commands to the server and
that's true! But the server runs the commands as the currently logged-in user,
so no extra permissions are provided (This is essentially the same as any app on
your desktop calling shell commands).
So yes, you're safe!