Awesome wm keyup and keydown events - awesome-wm

Question

I'm using Awesome Window Manager. I want to show my top bar by pressing mod4 and then hide it when I release. I tired passing "keyup Mod4" to awful.key but it does not work. How can I tell it that I want to trigger an event on keyup?

Answer 1

Try
`awful.key({ modkey }, "", nil, function () staff here end)`
3rd param is handler for "release" event when passed.

Answer 2

I wanted the same thing! After some research I came up with:
Use external program to execute echo 'mywibox[1].visible = true' | awesome-client when mod4 is pressed and echo 'mywibox[1].visible = false' | awesome-client when released.
Use other key, not modifier, like Menu (near right Ctrl), because for some reason you can't hook up press and release event to mod4 (or it just doesn't work).
Here is my solution (timer is required because pressed key sends events as long as it is pressed):
-- Put it somewhere at the beginning
presswait = { started = false }
-- Put it in key bindings section (globalkeys = within awful.table.join)
awful.key({ }, "Menu", function()
if presswait.started then
presswait:stop()
else
-- One second to tell if key is released
presswait = timer({ timeout = 1 })
presswait:connect_signal("timeout", function()
presswait:stop()
-- Key is released
for i = 1, screen.count() do
mywibox[i].visible = false
end
end)
-- Key is pressed
for i = 1, screen.count() do
mywibox[i].visible = true
end
end
presswait:start()
end)

Answer 3

You could connect a signal to the key object:
key.connect_signal("press", function(k)
-- Analyze k and act accordingly
end)
More about signals here:
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Signals

Answer 4

Using the first suggestion from https://stackoverflow.com/a/21837280/2656413
I wrote this python script: https://github.com/grandchild/autohidewibox
What it does is, it runs xinput in the background and parses its output. You could also parse /dev/input/event1 directly in python, but I was lazy.
It then pipes the following lua code to awesome every time the key is pressed or released:
echo 'for i, box in pairs(mywibox) do box.visible = true end' | awesome-client
and
echo 'for i, box in pairs(mywibox) do box.visible = false end' | awesome-client
respectively.
Update:
For awesome 4+ use:
echo "for s in screen do s.mywibox.visible = false end" | awesome-client
or true.