Toggling Yubikey (and other input devices) on/off on a timeout

Link: https://github.com/cdown/xinput-toggle

I wrote a tool last night to toggle attached Yubikeys on/off for Linux (well, X11) users. Previously it hadn't been a problem on my T460s, but I'm now temporarily using an X1 Carbon and the place I have to put the Yubikey is super awkward and ends up getting touched all the time. This tool ended up becoming a utility for generic xinput device on/off toggling and manipulation since most of the code applies to any device, not just Yubikeys.

The main benefit over using xinput directly is the timeout feature (available with -t), which will only enable the Yubikey for a specified period of time. This means you can keep your Yubikey off, only switching it on when you really need it.

It has no dependencies except for what you probably already have: the xinput command line utility, and bash 4.0+. It can also send notifications when it takes actions on the device if you have notify-send installed.

My suggested usage is to disable the Yubikey in your X startup files, and then have a binding in your window manager/desktop environment to enable it for 10 seconds, and then disable it again. That way it will only turn be able to send input when you explicitly let it.

For my config, that means adding the following to .xinitrc to disable the Yubikey at first:

xinput-toggle -r yubikey -d

You then can add a binding in your window manager (or make a shell alias) to run the following to enable it for 10 seconds on press (-n is optional, it sends a notification on enable/disable with notify-send):

xinput-toggle -r yubikey -n -e -t 10

This is already packaged in Arch Linux's AUR as xinput-toggle. Let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature requests. :-)