Program to press a key at timed intervals

Question

I was wondering if there was an open source program that would allow me to have a certain keystroke/key combination pressed every say, two seconds or so.

Answer 1

Yes, there is an open source program to create fake keyboard and mouse inputs for GNU/Linux. It is called Xdotool .

To press a key (in this example 'a') every two seconds you can use a script like this :

#!/bin/bash

while true; do
  xdotool key a
  sleep 2
done

If you make this script executable and add it to Startup Applications it will press 'a' every two seconds.

Here is the documentation for Xdotool

And here is the specific part on keyboard commands

Answer 2

If you are using a Logitech keyboard, there is a package called "g15macro" in the Ubuntu repo that is useful. Otherwise there are other open source applications such as "xmacro" and "xnee".