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Karabiner is bypassed by lan-mouse

Open TimMensch opened this issue 3 months ago • 3 comments

I'm a longtime Windows user, but I need to be able to use a Mac for work. I've reconfigured my Mac with Karabiner to have what my fingers consider a "sane" set of keyboard features.

Switching to lan-mouse, Karabiner is completely bypassed and I again can't use the Mac with any dexterity. It completely kills the usability of lan-mouse for me.

Karabiner needs to see a keyboard device that it can grab they keys from and translate them based on all of its installed rules. The fix for this would be to create a virtual keyboard (like Karabiner does itself) and route keys through that virtual keyboard instead of however lan-mouse currently triggers them.

Karabiner is a very core tool on Mac, and I'm surprised that no software-KVM actually supports it. I was hoping that lan-mouse would succeed where all of the Synergy-family products failed, but no, it has the same failure.

Any chance someone can fix this? I can't really justify spending the time to add this feature myself.

TimMensch avatar Sep 02 '25 21:09 TimMensch

There are a few apps that have this problem - Xcode is another one, where some of the dropdowns don't interact with lan-mouse at all, such as in this example:

Image

johnhamelink avatar Sep 03 '25 10:09 johnhamelink

The input emulation on MacOS is pretty bare bones atm. It might be worth looking into https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hiddriverkit to emulate a physical device. Otherwise I see no chance to get this to work with other input modifying software, as those probably operate on the same level.

And heads up: Never download any files from comments in github issues, there are a lot of malicious bots out there spreading malware.

feschber avatar Sep 03 '25 14:09 feschber

Additional research comes across this:

https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-DriverKit-VirtualHIDDevice

It's what Karabiner itself uses, but I'm betting it's trivial to change some IDs and deploy it a second time to be the keyboard/mouse for lan-mouse.

TimMensch avatar Sep 04 '25 00:09 TimMensch