How to assign a keyboard macro (and save a lot of typing)

[Frank Cox]

I think some of you use various flavours of Linux and even if you use Microsoft Windows there may be an equivalent way to do this there too.

I have a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 and it has a bunch of extra keys across the top, some of which don't do anything in particular.

So it occurred to me that I would a lot of typing when filling out forms if I could assign one of those keys to type my email address into a field.


Create this script, save it somewhere and make it executable.
#!/bin/bash
TEXT="example@example.com"
xdotool sleep 0.5 type $TEXT

Note: It needs the sleep parameter in there or you only get the last half of the email address typed when you press the hotkey.

Then system-preferences-hardware-keyboard shortcuts
Create new shortcut
Point to that script
Press the key you want to call it from.

Done.

If you're using Wayland instead of X, you can accomplish the same thing using the ydotool command instead of xdotool.

(This should work on Wayland but I don't have anything to test it on.)

#!/bin/bash
ydotool type --delay 1000 --key-delay 70 "example@example.com"

Google tells me that there are some xdotool equivalents for Windows too.

So now the next time I'm filling out a form and it asks for my email address I can just hit one of those do-nothing keys on the top of my keyboard. I've got more of them too, so I suppose I could add my phone number or name to one of them as well.

The joy of automation.

[Ryan Gallagher]

For when you run out of macro keys, be careful with this rabbit hole:
https://attackshark.com/blogs/news/c...we2ZXRbKVKIu1P

[Frank Cox]

Linux (or at least the Mate desktop, which is what I use) has a keyboard configuration screen that lets you do quite a few things to fine tune your keyboard.

One of the things I've changed is to swap the caps lock and left ctrl key. I use the vim text editor and having the ctrl key handy (on caps lock) is a lot better than having it at the bottom of the keyboard.

I've also created a custom do-nothing macro (that just runs the true command, which does nothing successfully) and assigned it to the right menu key since I always hit that one by mistake and ghawd-knows-what pops up whenever I do that. Now, it's effectively a dead key and I like it that way.

The idea for assigning my email address to one of those unassigned keys at the top came to me a few days ago but it took a while to figure out how it could be done.

[Scott Norwood]

Well, that's neat. I've always sort of wanted a 122-key 3270 terminal keyboard, but never had a use case for it under Linux (or Windows, for that matter). I might have to get one now. I have used xmodmap to swap ctrl and caps lock in the past, but I type on so many different keyboards in different places that I don't want to have to remember where I have made that change and where I haven't.