How to emulate/spoof keypress event in Haskell?

Question

How to emulate/spoof keypress event in Haskell?

I have an onscreen number keypad in my Gui which I want to use to write into a number of text entrys in the window. The Keypad is made up of button widgets and what I want to do is have the onButtonClicked handler send a keyPressEvent so that the appropriate char/number is written into the text entry that has focus. I started by looking at Graphics.UI.Gtk.Gdk.Events and made an keypress event

Event my1Event = Key True True Graphics.UI.Gtk.Gdk.Events.currentTime [] False False False 0xffb1 "KP_1" Nothing

I couldn't figure out how to dispatch this event. Anyway it turns out Event is deprecated and should use EventM. I found widgetEvent :: WidgetClass self => self -> EventM t Bool in Graphics.UI.Gtk.Abstract.Widget. In the api it says:

Rarely-used function. This function is used to emit the event signals on a widget (those signals should never be emitted without using this function to do so). If you want to synthesize an event though, don't use this function; instead, use mainDoEvent so the event will behave as if it were in the event queue.

So I looked at mainDoEvent :: EventM t () in Graphics.UI.Gtk.General.General but am unsure as how to use EventM to create a keypress and couldn't find an example of mainDoEvent in use. Can anybody advise me how to create a keypress event using EventM and pass it to mainDoEvent or some other way to do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Generating an event is the Wrong Way. Instead, you should insert your text using the appropriate function for your text widget. For example, for TextBuffers, use textBufferInsertAtCursor.