Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor.

With the upgrade to KDE Plasma 6.8 and transition to using Wayland rather than X11, one of the issues Donenfeld encountered with his workflow was being able to continue auto-typing text from a program. Out of that need he wrote the kwin-type program and announced today its v0.1 release.

For getting the password store working under KDE on Wayland and other needs where one may need to auto-type text, kwin-type works under the KWin Wayland compositor. This works with KWin 6.8 and newer where the restrictions on the fake-input protocol are loosened to allow for CLI applications to auto-type text.

Donenfeld elaborated on his need for creating kwin-type in today's v0.1 announcement:

"Some background: I didn't want to have to make such a utility, but all the existing utilities for this seemed deficient in one way or another -- requiring /dev/uinput or requiring virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1 or using portals + EIS. I actually initially made a utility that used libportal + libei called portal-type, which saved its token in a file and such to not need reauthorization, but it was clunky and did a lot of work for something so simple, so I was happy to finally come across this KDE-specific way of doing it cleanly. kwin-type uses org_kde_kwin_fake_input to type keys and org_kde_kwin_keystate to deal with capslock being potentially enabled. So it basically works like plasma's floating virtual keyboard."

KWin-Type for now is being hosted via Jason's Git repository.