compoBot — A bot to toot composekey sequences

The compose key (a.k.a. Multi Key) is a massively useful and (unfortunately) forgotten feature. It lets you type a keyboard sequence eg. <Multi_Key><t><m> and it inserts a special character: ™.

This bot regularly toots one of those sequences to a mastodon account so that everyone can appreciate them.

The sequences used, are standard on modern linux systems. However, the compose/multikey is usually not mapped on most keyboards. With xmodmap, it can be mapped to a rarely used key like menu or capslock. On windows systems, there is (WinCompose)[https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose] to get similar results.

Usage

compoBot can be used from shell or docker. The prerequisits are minimal: sqlite3, curl and the standard tools.

It is configured by environment variables wich may be set in a file called env.

Variable	Default	Description
database	./working-db.db3 /data/working-db.db3	Databasefile, should be persistant in docker
minWait	43200 (12 h)	Minimum random time to wait between toots
maxWait	86400 (24 h)	Maximum random time to wait between toots
mtdVisibility	direct	Privacy setting for the toot¹
mtdApi	https://mastodon.example/api/v1/statuses	API endpoint to sent statuses²
mtdToken	THIS_SHOULD_BE_A_Bearer-Token	API authentication²

¹) https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/ ²) https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/apps/#create-an-application