Avoid using sudo on Linux

Instructions

In Linux, kanata needs to be able to access the input and uinput subsystem to inject events. To do this, your user needs to have permissions. Follow the steps in this page to obtain user permissions.

NOTE: giving your login user input/uinput permissions puts you at risk of being keylogged or getting malicious key inputs sent into your system, if you choose to run malicious programs on your system. If you care a lot about that risk, you should follow the instructions below with a different user and start up kanata with that user, or use something like systemd to run kanata on startup. Never run untrusted code on your system though 😉.

1. If the uinput group does not exist, create a new group

sudo groupadd uinput

2. Add your user to the input and the uinput group

sudo usermod -aG input $USER
sudo usermod -aG uinput $USER

Make sure that it's effective by running groups. You might have to logout and login.

3. Make sure the uinput device file has the right permissions.

Add a udev rule (in either /etc/udev/rules.d or /lib/udev/rules.d) with the following content:

KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="uinput", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

4. Make sure the uinput drivers are loaded

You may need to run this command whenever you start kanata for the first time:

sudo modprobe uinput

Credits

The original text was taken and adapted from: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad/blob/master/doc/faq.md#linux