⌨️ Shiftie

Shiftie is a tiny Rust daemon that watches your keyboard input and turns a dual-shift tap into a synthetic Escape key press. Perfect for people who like modal editors but only have so many fingers! 🧙‍♂️

✨ Features

• 🔁 Runs as a background daemon with PID and log files stored in your system temp directory (e.g., /tmp).
• ⌨️ Auto-discovers evdev-compatible keyboards that report both left and right shift keys.
• 🚨 Emits a virtual Escape key press the moment both shift keys are pressed together.
• 🧹 Cleans up its PID file when the daemon exits.

🚀 Getting started

1. 📦 Install Rust (https://rustup.rs/) if you don't have it already.
2. 🛠️ Build the project:

   cargo build --release
   

3. 🔐 Ensure you have permission to read from input devices (you may need to run as root or add your user to the appropriate input group).

🕹️ Usage

Shiftie ships with a small CLI built using clap:

cargo run start  # default; launches the daemon
cargo run stop   # sends SIGTERM to the running daemon
cargo run run    # runs in the foreground for debugging

• When starting, Shiftie checks for an existing PID file at something like /tmp/shifty.pid and refuses to launch if another instance is alive.
• The daemon writes logs to the temp directory as shifty.log.
• run mode keeps everything in the foreground so you can watch log output in real time.

🧪 How it works

• 🕵️‍♂️ Enumerates input devices with evdev and spawns a thread per device to listen for key events.
• 🧮 Tracks the state of the left and right shift keys; once both are down simultaneously, an Escape key press/release sequence is emitted through a virtual keyboard created with evdev's uinput bindings.
• 🧱 Uses a guard object to ensure PID files are cleaned up even on panic.

🛑 Stopping the daemon

Running shifty stop sends SIGTERM to the recorded PID and waits (up to 5 seconds) for the process to exit, tidying up the PID file when done.

🧰 Development

• 📚 The code lives in src/main.rs.
• 🧪 Run the daemon in the foreground while developing with:

  cargo run -- run
  

• 🧹 Format/lint as you normally would; no extra tooling is required.

Enjoy the new Escape key superpower! 🚀