Re: [GD-Linux] X mouse/keyboard grabs

[D. S. <st...@at...>]

Timothee Besset wrote:

> Hey everyone
>
> I am playing with X keyboard/mouse grabs stuff for our next game.
> Wondering if there's a way to configure the X server (or anything else) so
> that even with the grabs on in the game you could do a key combo forcing
> mouse/keyboard release on the application? For instance during a long
> load, or on a gdb breakpoint etc.


You might be able to do something that fakes it. There is a rather old 
but fun utility program you can look at to see what I'm talking about, 
called x2x. It simply allows a pointer device and keyboard from a 2nd 
X11 machine to take control of the first machine, but not interfere with 
the mouse/keyboard of the first machine. It is sort of a poor man's 
version of Xinerama across two machines, without the copy/paste or other 
nice things of Xinerama. Basically, even if you can't alter the one 
device (and you might be able to, I don't know), perhaps you could 
create two virtual pointer devices, and have the hardware switch which 
device it talks to at the moment (this would require that mouse and 
keyboard device events are what are grabbed, and *not* the pointer 
itself...if the pointer is free to do what it likes, and the 
mouse/keyboard bindings are not, then tell your mouse/keyboard to attach 
to a different virtual device which is not limited). Only the first 
device would have the grab events applied to it. See:
   http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/x2x/

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi DOT com