This chapter discusses various input device support.

Input Support

EGT supports various different backends for gathering input device events.

Library	Type
libinput	Keyboard, Mouse, Touchscreen
tslib	Touchscreen
raw evdev	Keyboard, Mouse, Touchscreen, Other
X11	Keyboard, Mouse, Touchscreen

By default, EGT uses the libinput backend configured to use seat0, so input devices are automatically detected with the help of udev. To change this behavior, see Environment Variables for some environment variables that are useful for configuring input devices.

Keyboard Mapping

By default, EGT will use a built-in static keyboard mapping. In most cases, this should be sufficient. However, in the event you wish to have a system level and more flexible way of managing simple or complex keyboard mappings, EGT also supports the use of libxkbcommon irrelevant of using the X11 backend.

‍xkbcommon is a library for handling of keyboard descriptions, including loading them from disk, parsing them and handling their state. It's mainly meant for client toolkits, window systems, and other system applications

What this means is libxkbcommon is not all that is needed. You must also have data files available that describe various components needed for doing proper keyboard mappings, which are not included with xkbcommon. In standard distributions this is usually distributed in a package named xkeyboard-config or xdata. See the xkbcommon documentation for more information.

libinput

libinput is the prime interface to receive keyboard and touchscreen or pointer events. libinput does not support gestures on these interfaces.

While EGT does include ways to configure how it uses libinput, this should not be used as an end-all means of configuring input devices with libinput. libinput has a well documented and solid way of configuring input devices and even has tools for debugging configuration of input devices.

Also, take special note of udev configuration of devices that controls how they are introduced to libinput.

Note: libinput will not work if CONFIG_NET is disabled in kernel.