Keyboard Grabbing Protocol Proposed For Wayland

Red Hat developer Olivier Fourdan has proposed adding a keyboard grabbing protocol to Wayland.

The use-case for this keyboard grabbing protocol is virtual machines or remote connection viewers (e.g. VNC viewer) and even XWayland. Olivier described, "The compositor may inform and ask the user if (s)he agrees with a given applications grabbing the keyboard, might put in place a visual indication that a grab is in effect, even allow the user to terminate the grab whenever (s)he wants, etc. This is all up to the compositor and the user to decide. I modelled this protocol after the keyboard locking mechanism but did not keep the lifetime parameter, to keep things as simple as possible."

This keyboard grabbing protocol would basically forward all keyboard events to a particular Wayland surface. Developers and interested Wayland fans can learn more details about this proposal via the Wayland mailing list.