rainmeter native keyboard support for skins

[thrive2]

Good day,

Not sure if this has been addressed, I did do a search but
could not find any explicit information, but -why- does
rainmeter not support the keyboard natively?

There is a external plugin called hotkey, there is an
internal plugin / measure mediakey but no regular
support like for the mouse.

Will this possibly be introduced in a newer version
of rainmeter or is (native) keyboard support simply
of the cards?

[jsmorley]

I think we are unlikely to introduce hotkey support natively into Rainmeter. Hotkeys are generally used in the context of an application that has "focus", and to a large extent that isn't what Rainmeter is about. We certainly are not in favor of having Rainmeter override or conflict with the hotkeys that are in virtually every Windows application AND in the Windows UI itself, so that would mean that we would react to hotkeys only when a particular Rainmeter skin has "focus". That is pretty close to useless in my view. If you are going to have to click on a skin to get it "listening" to you anyway, just click on something that takes the action you want.

I would additionally be entirely opposed to anything further than "hotkeys". Any kind of keystroke "capture" is a very insecure thing to do, and that will never, ever happen in Rainmeter. The fact that keystrokes can be "captured" in the AutoIt programming / scripting tool is the very reason why that tool, as good as it is in most respects, is regrettably pretty universally hated by antivirus applications.

This is just my opinion, and others may take another view, but I would point out that there is the HotKey plugin, which seems to me to have the features needed for those that want to go that route. While I'm not in principle opposed, I see no strong advantage to building this functionality into Rainmeter.

3rd-party plugins are not in and of themselves a bad thing. They are in fact one of the big strengths of Rainmeter. It means that Rainmeter can be "extended" by any member of the community, as they feel the need, and that can easily be shared with the rest of the community. I don't particularly agree with those who make it a matter of principle to avoid using either 3rd-party plugins or Lua scripts. I think that is short-sighted and sorta weird. Sure there is a little more work involved for the "author" of a skin to include the plugin .dll or Lua script with the .rmskin they distribute, but that is all entirely transparent to the end user. So while I'm in favor of building in functionality that is widely popular, which both makes things a tad simpler for authors, and also allows us to have better control over updates and documentation of the functionality, that doesn't in my view mean that every plugin ever written needs to be taken over by us and incorporated into the Rainmeter build.

[thrive2]

Snappy

Ok so it's of the cards.
Understand your reasoning to some extent, all though as you
say listing to the keyboard could take place after the skin
gets focus not before, but still respect you point of view and
that's how the cookie crumbles

Thanks for the reply.