gkey

Browsers solved keyboard-only navigation years ago. The desktop around them did not: you still reach for the mouse to click a button in a native app, and every attempt to fix it with global hotkeys collides with whatever application wanted the same chord.

Low-level keyboard hooks are a hostile environment. Windows silently unhooks a callback that exceeds its timeout, leaving a daemon that is running but permanently deaf. AltGr layouts inject a synthetic left Control before every right Alt, so a remapped Control misfires on every accented character. Key auto-repeat means a held key can rapid-toggle a mode. Each of these is invisible until it happens to a user.

The hook thread only classifies and enqueues — all real work happens on a separate engine thread, keeping the callback far below the unhook timeout. A heartbeat watchdog detects the silent removal anyway and reinstalls the hook from the hook thread. Injected input is tagged with a signature so the engine ignores its own events, and SendInput uses scancodes so bindings are keyboard-layout independent. Motion and scroll ride the OS auto-repeat for continuous movement while one-shot actions fire once per physical press, and a one-second reconciler clears stuck modifiers cross-checked against GetAsyncKeyState.

Cursor drive, click and scroll, hint-mode overlays over clickable elements, key remaps, and BSP tiling with live re-tiling driven by window lifecycle events. Windows Smart App Control blocks unsigned binaries on my dev machine, so the runtime status of each milestone is documented honestly in the repository rather than assumed.