live-split-hotkeys

When running LiveSplit on Linux via Proton, the global hotkeys feature doesn't work. live-split-hotkeys is a small program that listens for hotkeys and forwards them to LiveSplit. It has a few advantages over using something like xdotool:

• Not specific to any particular display server (e.g. X or Wayland)
• Reads hotkeys directly from your LiveSplit settings so you don't have to maintain hotkeys in two places
• I can't speak for xbindkeys, but I found Ubuntu custom keyboard shortcuts to be unreliable. For example, the shortcut wouldn't trigger if I had other keys pressed at the same time.

Usage

1. Install and set up LiveSplit Server if you haven't before.
2. Make sure you have the "Global hotkeys" option checked in LiveSplit. If you don't, check it and restart LiveSplit.
3. Make sure live-split-hotkeys has access to your keyboard devices in /dev/input. The easiest way would be to run it with sudo.
4. Start live-split-hotkeys after starting LiveSplit and let it run. You'll probably need to tell it where to find LiveSplit's settings.cfg with the --settings option. You can kill it with ctrl+c when you're done. Use live-split-hotkeys -h for help.

Limitations

• Only tested on Ubuntu 22.10 with a US English keyboard. I can't currently confirm whether it will work on other distros or with other keyboard layouts.
• No controller support.
• Doesn't support the "switch comparison" hotkeys.
• If live-split-hotkeys is running while the LiveSplit window has focus, hotkeys will be double-triggered.
• If you change your hotkeys, you'll need to restart LiveSplit and then live-split-hotkeys. This is because live-split-hotkeys reads your hotkeys from LiveSplit's settings.cfg on startup, and LiveSplit only updates that file when it exits.
• If you have multiple keyboard devices (which can include things like gaming mice with programmable buttons), weird things might happen if you press the same key(s) on more than one at the same time.

Troubleshooting

• Failed to open LiveSplit settings: LiveSplit settings are assumed to be in $HOME/LiveSplit/settings.cfg. If that's not where you have LiveSplit (and keep in mind $HOME will be /root if running the command with sudo), pass a different path with the --settings option.
• No keyboard devices found: Any device in /dev/input/by-path/ that ends with -event-kbd is considered to be a keyboard. If your keyboard devices don't match that pattern, use the --devices option to tell it which device(s) to watch.
• Could not connect to LiveSplit server: Make sure LiveSplit is running and you've started the server (see the LiveSplit Server setup instructions).
• could not open /dev/input/...: You don't have permission to the keyboard device file(s). The easiest way to fix this is to run it with sudo. I wouldn't recommend giving your user account permission to those files as that would allow any program you run to keylog you. You're of course free to find any other solution that fits your security preferences. Personally, I use setcap to give the executable the CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH capability so I don't have to run it as root.