onthefly

onthefly allows you to emulate typing the contents of an input file by wildly pressing the asdfjkl; keys on your keyboard.

Great for live coding presentations.

Features

• Unicode support (you need ibus installed and running)
• Works with any text editor (in fact, with any program)

Installation

Install and update using pip:

> sudo python -m pip install onthefly

Usage

Identify your keyboard's device path with the command line tool evtest:

> sudo evtest

ID  Device               Name                                 ...
------------------------------------------------------------- ...
0   /dev/input/event0    Lid Switch                           ...
1   /dev/input/event1    Power Button                         ...
2   /dev/input/event2    Sleep Button                         ...
3   /dev/input/event3    Power Button                         ...
4   /dev/input/event4    AT Translated Set 2 keyboard         ...
5   /dev/input/event5    Video Bus                            ...
6   /dev/input/event6    Logitech M215 2nd Gen                ...
7   /dev/input/event7    Logitech K330                        ...
8   /dev/input/event8    SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad           ...
.
.
.

From this output, we see that my keyboard (a Logitech K330) has the device path /dev/input/event7.

Pass your keyboard's device path as an argument to the --keyboard option when invoking onthefly for the first time.

> onthefly --keyboard="/dev/input/event7" /path/to/file

Note that onthefly prompts for the root password in order to have access to the keyboard events.

The keyboard's device path is remembered so you do not have to re-enter it in future invocations:

> onthefly /path/to/file

Type the F9 key to quit the program at any moment. Use the Backspace key to erase characters without going out of sync with the input file.

License

• Free software: MIT license

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.