NAME¶

buckle-x11 - Nostalgia bucklespring keyboard sound, X11 flavour

SYNOPSIS¶

buckle-x11 [options]

DESCRIPTION¶

Buckle emulates the sound of an old IBM Model-M space saver bucklespring keyboard while typing within an X session.

It runs as a background process and plays back the sound of each key pressed and released on the keyboard, just as if using an IBM Model-M. The sound of each key has carefully been sampled, and is played back while simulating the proper distance and direction for a realistic 3D sound palette of pure nostalgic bliss.

This flavour grabs key events through X11, and therefore only reports keys typed within an X session. For Wayland compositors and for the console, see buckle-libinput(1).

The mouse clicks too: the buttons, and the scroll wheel, one click per detent. Use --no-click to silence it, or to silence only some of it.

A key held down long enough to repeat clicks for every repeat. The X server does not repeat the modifier keys, so holding shift stays quiet by itself.

Where it was built with the system tray, and there is a tray to put it in, an icon appears there with a menu for pausing, the volume, the output device and quitting. The volume is a submenu of levels with + and - at the ends of it, and rolling the wheel over the icon changes it without opening the menu at all. --no-tray leaves it out. The icon is a StatusNotifierItem, which KDE Plasma shows as it is and GNOME Shell shows through an extension; where nothing is listening there is simply no icon and nothing else changes.

OPTIONS¶

-d, --device=DEVICE

use OpenAL audio device DEVICE

-f, --fallback-sound

use a fallback sound for unknown keys

-g, --gain=GAIN

set playback gain [0..100]

-m, --mute-keycode=CODE

use CODE as mute key (default 0x46 for scroll lock)

-M, --mute

start the program muted

-c, --no-click[=LIST]

don't play a sound on mouse click; LIST narrows it to some of left, middle, right, side, extra, wheel, hwheel, all, none

-h, --help

show help

-l, --list-devices

list available OpenAL audio devices

-p, --audio-path=PATH

load .wav files from directory PATH

-r, --no-repeat

stay silent while a held key auto repeats

--repeat-delay=MS

wait MS before the first repeat, overriding what the compositor or the kernel says

--repeat-rate=HZ

make HZ repeats per second, likewise

-s, --stereo-width=WIDTH

set stereo width [0..100]

--no-tray

do not put an icon in the system tray

-v, --verbose

increase verbosity / debugging

-V, --version

show version and exit

AUTHOR¶

Written by Ico Doornekamp.

COPYRIGHT¶

Copyright © 2016-2025 Ico Doornekamp License GPLv2+: GNU GPL version 2 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

This manual page is generated from the output of buckle-x11 --help and --version by help2man(1), around wording written by Dominik George for the Debian project.

SEE ALSO¶

buckle-x11.service(8), buckle-libinput(1), update-alternatives(1)