Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure

Summary

Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure In 2007, I was spending a my norther-hemisphere summer experimenting with UI automation. Born of those efforts, xdotool came into being when I separated it from another project. The goal was modest - write some scripts that execute common keyboard, mouse, and window management tasks. The first commit had only a few basic commands - basic mouse and keyboard actions, plus a few window management actions like movement, focus, and searching. Xdotool sprouted new features as time rolled on. Today, the project is 18 years old, and still going! Time’s forward progress also brought external changes: Wayland came along hoping to replace X11, and later Ubuntu tried to take a bite by launching Mir. Noise about Wayland, both good and bad, floated around for years before major distros began shipping it. It wasn’t until 2016 when Fedora became the first distribution to ship it at all and even then, it was only for GNOME. It would be another five years before Fedora shipped KDE support for Wayland. Ubuntu defaulted to Wayland it in 2017, almost a decade after Wayland began, but switched back to X11 on the next release because screen sharing and remote desktop weren’t available. Screen sharing and remote desktop. Features that have existed for decades on other systems, that we all knew would be needed? They weren’t available and distros were shipping a default Wayland experience without them. It was a long time before you could join a Zoom call and share your screen. Awkward. All this to say, Wayland has been a long, bumpy road. Back to xdotool: xdotool relies on a few X11 features that have existed since before I even started using Linux: Standard X11 operations - Searching for windows by their title, moving windows, resizing them, closing, etc. XTest - A means to “test” things on X11 without requiring user action. This provides a way to perform mouse and keyboard actions from your code. You can type, you can move the mo...