Log number of keystrokes, mouse delta

[ErikBjare]

One aspect of this seems difficult: We'd want to log the number of keystrokes per window, so that'd mean we have to couple the keycount event duration to the window event somehow.

Not sure how to do this without tying it into the window watcher one way or another. A slightly depraved solution would be to poll/subscribe to the window events and create a new entry where appropriate. I can imagine a bunch of solutions involving the server as well but I'd rather not just for this specific case.

[TimeToBuildBob]

This is an interesting design challenge that's been open for a while. Some thoughts on the architecture:

The coupling problem you identified: Keystrokes/mouse delta are meaningless without knowing which window they occurred in. The window watcher and AFK watcher run as separate processes with separate heartbeat loops, so correlating events requires either:

1. Client-side join via timestamps: Each watcher stores its own events, and the webui (or a query) joins them by overlapping time ranges. This is how AW already works for AFK + window events. A new aw-watcher-input could store events like {"keystrokes": 42, "mouse_delta": 1200, "duration": 30} with heartbeats, and the webui would join these with window events via the existing query language. No coupling needed between watchers.

2. Polling the window watcher's bucket: The input watcher queries the window watcher's latest event via the REST API (GET /api/0/buckets/aw-watcher-window-{host}/events?limit=1) and tags its own events with the current window. This creates a dependency but gives exact per-window attribution.

Practical recommendation: Option 1 is cleaner and follows AW's existing architecture. The query language can already do temporal joins:

input_events = query_bucket("aw-watcher-input-{host}")
window_events = query_bucket("aw-watcher-window-{host}")
merged = merge_events_by_keys(window_events, input_events)

Implementation sketch: A lightweight aw-watcher-input that:

• On Linux: reads /dev/input/event* via evdev (requires input group membership)
• Counts keystrokes and accumulates mouse delta per heartbeat interval (default 5s)
• Sends heartbeats with {"keystrokes": N, "mouse_delta_px": M}
• Does NOT log which keys — just counts (privacy-preserving)

The awatcher Rust watcher could absorb this since it already has access to input events. The Python watcher would need the evdev library.