Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland + Electron shortcuts in Witsy

[tisDDM]

On Ubuntu GNOME/Wayland machines I’ve seen Electron’s global shortcuts act flaky: sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, and in the worst case they interfered with GNOME system shortcuts (even copy/paste) until a restart.

I opened two PRs to make this safer and more predictable:

• PR 1 (default-off on Wayland): feat(shortcuts): Wayland-aware toggle (default off on Wayland) #405
  • Disables global shortcuts by default on Wayland. There’s a simple toggle in the UI if you want to turn them back on and accept the trade-offs. This keeps new users out of trouble but doesn’t block users, where it works.
• PR 2 (CLI/HTTP trigger path): feat(http): minimal local HTTP trigger #406
  • Adds a Wayland-friendly alternative using GNOME Custom Shortcuts that call a local CLI/HTTP trigger. No global key grabs, no key injection — just let GNOME handle the keybinding and forward to the running app.

While exploring that approach, I built a small companion project as a proof of concept:

• wbridge: https://github.com/DasDigitaleMomentum/wbridge
  • It’s a Wayland-friendly bridge for GNOME: GNOME shortcut → CLI → running GTK app reads your current selection and runs an action (HTTP or Shell). This feels a lot more reliable on Wayland.
• You also can find the latest release of witsy containing the patches here: https://github.com/tisDDM/witsy/tree/maintained-main

I also considered the GNOME “command-line params” style workaround. The CLI-trigger pattern keeps the CLI thin and hands off the heavy lifting to the running process, which behaves more predictably in practice.

Side note: I made this PoC to test GPT‑5 with Cline’s newer “Deep & Focus” features, happy to share notes on that dev workflow if there’s interest.

Thanks for reading — feedback very welcome