triggerhappy (a lightweight global hotkey daemon)

Triggerhappy is a hotkey daemon that operates on a system wide
scale. It watches all configured input devices for key, switch,
or button events and can launch arbitrary commands specified by the
administrator. In contrast to hotkey services provided by desktop
environments, triggerhappy is especially suited to hardware related
switches like volume or wifi control; it works independently from
a specific user being logged in and is also suitable for embedded
systems that do not have a graphical user interface.

The disadvantage of using triggerhappy is that it must be run with
root privileges. However, it will drop root privilege and run as
'nobody' after initialization, with the provided rc.triggerhappy
script.

After installing the package, you'll want to:

  1. Read the man page for thd, particularly the EXAMPLES section.

  2. Create one or more config files, matching the pattern:

     /etc/triggerhappy/triggers.d/*.conf

     See the example files in /etc/triggerhappy/triggers.d/ for ideas.

  3. chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.triggerhappy

  4. /etc/rc.d/rc.triggerhappy start

  5. Test that things work the way you want, according to your config
     files from step 2. If not, fix them. Don't forget to run
     /etc/rc.d/rc.triggerhappy restart after editing the config(s).

  6. Add this to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

     if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.triggerhappy ]; then
       /etc/rc.d/rc.triggerhappy start
     fi

After this, the daemon will start on boot. To add devices to the
running daemon, use th-cmd's --passfd option (not --add, since the
daemon drops privileges after startup).