OS-agnostic?

[SuperCowProducts]

I came here looking for a universal xdotool alternative, and hear that kdotool also works on x11: will kdotool also work on other DEs though like Gnome for example? If not, how could an even more generic OS-agnostic program be made / what is the closest thing we have as of now? I found a use case in which this would be useful, so I would be willing to contribute to that aspect.

[jinliu]

No, kdotool is based on kwin's private scripting API, so it works on kwin Wayland and X11, but no other DEs / compositors.

The problem is Wayland designers removed all those APIs they don't want "normal" apps to use. But shells and tools still need them, so each DE ends up specifying private APIs (in the form of private Wayland protocols, DBus APIs, scripting APIs...). So there won't be a xdotool like program that calls the common X11 API, because there's no such common "privileged" protocol for Wayland.

Toward generic tools, either 1) Each tool has multiple backends for each DE. E.g. kdotool can have another backend for GNOME, which probably uses GNOME Shell's scripting API. And another for wlroots-based compositors. or 2) Each DE has a plugin that expose those functions via a common (DBus) API. Since sandboxed (Flatpak) apps doesn't have DBus access by default, this would not weaken Wayland security.

Option 1 would be too much work. Option 2 seems more feasible, but currently, KDE, GNOME and wlroots-based compositors all have very different private APIs, so their intersection might be quite limited.

[SuperCowProducts]

Thank you for making me aware of this, I will keep an eye out for development progress on this and will try to embrace any change which will allow moving forwards on this. It will make everyone's life easier when using Linux 👍