mousekeys daemon for linux (written in Rust)
A highly configurable mousekeys daemon.
It has somewhat similar functionality to the Windows mousekeys daemon but is slightly different.
It has three modes, depending on the modifier in use (CTRL key held down (fast, linear movement), SHIFT key held down (slow, linear movement), or no key held down (movement acceleration with exponential smoothing).
All three modes' speeds and the default mode's acceleration is tweakable in the conf (must be in the same directory as the binary).
See the .conf for other options, and also see the header of the source code for more details of how it works (main.rs).
Must be run as root: sudo ./mousekeys &
WARNING: Not heavily tested, so use at your own risk! (It is multithreaded, so there is a chance there may be a bug somewhere that causes a lockup while processing xinput events.)
WARNING: Not heavily tested, so use at your own risk! (It is multithreaded, so there is a chance there may be a bug somewhere that causes a lockup while processing xinput events.)
WARNING: Not heavily tested, so use at your own risk! (It is multithreaded, so there is a chance there may be a bug somewhere that causes a lockup while processing xinput events.)
Edit the mousekeys.conf (must be in the same directory as the binary) to tweak the acceleration and speed.
Run cargo build --release to build it.
Copy the the config/mousekeys.conf to the target/release/ and edit it (it has a fairly aggressive setup as the default).
cd target/releast
Run sudo ./mousekeys & to launch it as a daemon. Can be kept running interactively to see information about what keyboard it is (prioritizing) using.
To tune the settings: I suggest running it interactively at first (no &), hit CTRL-C if it is not to your taste to kill it, and then tweak the .conf settings and repeat until it is to your preferences.
I don't recommend adding it to startup scripts as it is very much not widely tested.
My own current environment that I am using it with is the latest Ubuntu 24 TLS (gnome-desktop 34, mutter 36, Wayland) with an external USB keyboard.
Written by Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), and myself.