SharpHook.Reactive 1.0.0-preview.1

SharpHook.Reactive

SharpHook is a library which provides a cross-platform global keyboard and mouse hook for .NET. It is a thin wrapper of libuiohook and provides direct access to its features as well as a higher-level interface and classes to work with it.

Supported Platforms

<table> <tr> <th></th> <th>Windows</th> <th>macOS</th> <th>Linux</th> </tr> <tr> <th>x86</th> <td>Yes</td> <td>N/A</td> <td>No¹</td> </tr> <tr> <th>x64</th> <td>Yes</td> <td>Yes</td> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Arm32</th> <td>Yes²</td> <td>N/A</td> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Arm64</th> <td>No³</td> <td>Yes</td> <td>Yes</td> </tr> </table>

[1] - Linux on x86 is not supported by .NET itself.

[2] - Windows Arm32 support was dropped in .NET 5 so it will most probably be dropped by this library in a future version as well.

[3] - Windows on Arm64 is not yet supported by libuiohook.

libuiohook only supports X11 on Linux. Wayland support may be coming, but it's not yet here.

Usage

Basic Usage

Referer to the SharpHook package README for the basic usage guidelines.

Reactive Global Hooks

SharpHook.Reactive provides the IReactiveGlobalHook interface along with a default implementation and an adapter which you can use to use to control the hook and subscribe to its observables. Here's a basic example:

using SharpHook.Reactive;

// ...

var hook = new SimpleReactiveGlobalHook();

hook.HookEnabled.Subscribe(OnHookEnabled);
hook.HookDisabled.Subscribe(OnHookDisabled);

hook.KeyTyped.Subscribe(OnKeyTyped);
hook.KeyPressed.Subscribe(OnKeyPressed);
hook.KeyReleased.Subscribe(OnKeyReleased);

hook.MouseClicked.Subscribe(OnMouseClicked);
hook.MousePressed.Subscribe(OnMousePressed);
hook.MouseReleased.Subscribe(OnMouseReleased);

hook.MouseMoved
    .Throttle(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5))
    .Subscribe(OnMouseMoved);

hook.MouseDragged
    .Throttle(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5))
    .Subscribe(OnMouseDragged);

hook.MouseWheel.Subscribe(OnMouseWheel);

await hook.Start();

Reactive global hooks are basically the same as the default global hooks and the same rules apply to them.

SharpHook.Reactive provides two implementations of IReactiveGlobalHook:

• SimpleReactiveGlobalHook runs the hook on a separate thread. Since we are dealing with observables, it's up to you to decide when and where to handle the events through schedulers.

• ReactiveGlobalHookAdapter adapts an IGlobalHook to IReactiveGlobalHook. All subscriptions and changes are propagated to the adapted hook.

Limitations

You have to remember that libuiohook binaries should be present in the curent working directory. This is how P/Invoke works, and it can cause the 'library not found' issues when running your client app from a different directory.

Another thing is that libuiohook supports hooking into its logging capabilities so that you can get its logs. This library doesn't support this. The reason is that you should call hook_set_logger_proc and pass your callback for logging. This is similar to hook_set_dispatch_proc, but this time the callback should accept a variable number of arguments (using C's ... syntax) and the client decides how to format the log message. Supporting native variable arguments in callbacks is next to impossible in C#, and the payoff is not worth spending a lot of effort to implement this feature.

Icon

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