libei

This is the libei/libeis/liboeffis API reference. For the protocol documentation see here.

libei provides three different libraries, libei for clients that need to emulate or capture input events and libeis for servers that manage those input events (read: compositors). It also provides the liboeffis to abstract connecting to the XDG RemoteDesktop portal.

A common setup looks like this:

                   +-----------------------+       +----------------+
physical devices - | libinput | compositor | ----- | Wayland client |
                   +----------+------------+   ^   +----------------+
                              |   libeis   |   |
                              +------------+   Wayland events
                                    ||
                                    || <-- EI events
                                    ||
                              +-------------+
                              |    libei    |
                              +-------------+
                              | application |
                              +-------------+

Notably, the process using libeis is in control of all input devices. A libei client can send events but it is up to the EIS implementation to process them.

The two libraries are independently and usually a process uses either libei or libeis but not both.

🥚 EI - the client implementation

The libei library is the component used by clients that want to emulate input events. It provides the required methods to connect to an EIS implementation, query for input devices available to the client, and send input.

The API documentation for EI is available at 🥚 EI - The client API.

🍦 EIS - the server implementation

The libeis library is the component used by processes that handle input events. It provides the required methods to set up seats and input devices, accept libei client connections, and receive input events from those clients.

The API documentation for EI is available at 🍦 EIS - The server API.

🚌 Oeffis - a XDG RemoteDesktop portal wrapper API

liboeffis is a helper library for applications that do not want to or cannot interact with the XDG RemoteDesktop DBus portal directly. It abstracts the DBus connection handling into a small and simple API.

The API documentation for EI is available at oeffis.

Examples

Please see the demo programs in the git repository.

The eis-demo-client is a minimal client that connects to an EIS implementation and sends events.

The eis-demo-server is a minimal EIS implementation that accepts all requests and prints them to screen.

The oeffis-demo-tool is a minimal implementation to connect to the XDG RemoteDesktop portal and request an fd that could then be passed to ei_setup_backend_fd().

Building against libei, libeis or liboeffis

libei, libeis and liboeffis provide pkg-config files. Software that uses libei, libeis or liboeffis should use pkg-config and the PKG_CHECK_MODULES autoconf macro or the dependency() function in meson.

Otherwise, the most rudimentary way to compile and link a program against libei, libeis or liboeffis is:

    gcc -o myprogram mylibeiclient.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs libei-1.0`
    gcc -o myprogram myEISimplementation.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs libeis-1.0`
    gcc -o myprogram myimpl.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs liboeffis-1.0`

For further information on using pkgconfig see the pkg-config documentation.

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Documentation generated from git commit 5d6d8e6