libei and a fancy protocol

libei is the library for Emulated Input - see this post for an introduction. Like many projects, libei was started when it was still unclear if it could be the right solution to the problem. In the years (!) since, we've upgraded the answer to that question from "hopefully" to "yeah, I reckon" - doubly so since we added support for receiver contexts and got InputLeap working through the various portal changes.

Emulating or capturing input needs two processes to communicate for obvious reasons so the communication protocol is a core part of it. But initially, libei was a quickly written prototype and the protocol was hacked up on an as-needed let's-get-this-working basis. The rest of the C API got stable enough but the protocol was the missing bit. Long-term the protocol must be stable - without a stable protocol updating your compositor may break all flatpaks still shipping an older libei. Or updating a flatpak may not work with an older compositor. So in the last weeks/months, a lot of work as gone into making the protocol stable. This consisted of two parts: drop protobuf and make the variuos features interface-dependent, unashamedly quite like the Wayland protocol which is also split into a number of interfaces that can be independently versioned. Initially, I attempted to make the protocol binary compatible with Wayland but dropped that goal eventually - the benefits were minimal and the effort and limitations (due to different requirements) were quite significant.

The protocol is defined in a single XML file and can be used directly from language bindings (if any). The protocol documentation is quite extensive but it's relatively trivial in principal: the first 8 bytes of each message are the object ID, then we have 4 bytes for the message length in bytes, then 4 for the object-specific opcode. That opcode is one of the requests or events in the object's interface - which is defined at object creation time. Unlike Wayland, the majority of objects in libei are created in server-side (the EIS implementation decides which seats are available and which devices in those seats). The remainder of the message are the arguments. Note that unlike other protocols the message does not carry a signature - prior knowledge of the message is required to parse the arguments. This is a direct effect of initially making it wayland-compatible and I didn't really find it worth the effort to add this.

Anyway, long story short: swapping the protocol out didn't initially have any effect on the C library but with the changes came some minor updates to remove some of the warts in the API. Perhaps the biggest change is that the previous capabilities of a device are now split across several interfaces. Your average mouse-like emulated device will have the "pointer", "button" and "scroll" interfaces, or maybe the "pointer_absolute", "button" and "scroll" interface. The touch and keyboard interfaces were left as-is. Future interfaces will likely include gestures and tablet tools, I have done some rough prototyping locally and it will fit in nicely enough with the current protocol.

At the time of writing, the protocol is not officialy stable but I have no intention of changing it short of some bug we may discover. Expect libei 1.0 very soon.