Great idea. Some comments:

powerbutton_three (prox lock): we shouldn't need a button to kill it in an ideal world. Since this is a "debug thing" we can remove it. User can ssh in if things go to shit.

powerbutton_three (terminal): it's pretty easy to open a new terminal via menu -> apps -> st, so this can o

voldown_two: in dwm the layout toggle is still on the statusbar. Maybe put it there for sway too? or just stuff this within a menu item.

voldown_three seems kind of necessary --- I can't think of a gesture I'd want to kill my app.

So really only one I'd want to keep is voldown_three -> some safe (and quick) way to kill current client...

I've been running this daily for a few days, and I really like the snappy-ness of the instant feedback for opening the menu and toggling the keyboard. I think a lot of my frustration has come from my device's power button having some "chatter"/noise when I press it (it sometimes presses itself a second time when I'm releasing the button). (so by keeping it "simple", I was able to discover this hardware fault more easily).

voldown_two: in the ticket, I said it could be mimicked with super+e, which is somewhat incorrect (it toggles from horizontal to vertical split). super+w goes into "tabbed" mode in sway. Personally I'm fine doing it with the keyboard, since it's not too frequent that I'm running more than four apps.

voldown_three: we've long since had the two fingers down and three fingers down to close/kill a program. My comment above for the shortcut was wrong, its super+shift+q to kill the running app.

An alternative proposal would be to keep the instant 'tap' commands, but allow 'longhold-release' to also execute something. So pressing volumedown would toggle the keyboard, but if you held it, then releasing would kill the current app.

pressing volume up could open the menu, but if you held it, then releasing would close that menu and open the wmmenu.

(nothing would be added to the powerbutton, because the dpms commands already take up to half a second).

Of course, this point of this ticket is "Simplicity", which this second proposal doesn't serve, so I'll pretend I never thought of it.

Another thought I just had (if our goal is to eliminate physical presses): we could rewrite the "butt wakeup" code so that it takes one power button followed by a swipe up to fully unlock the phone.

Could someone writeup a way to implement these changes? Just to test? I am really tired of pulling out my phone only to see its almost dead/already dead because the phone lock screen didnt turn off the screen or it just accidentally turned on the screen.

Might have a look into it, don't count on me but! haha.

I do like Peter's idea of a second action independent from the power button to fully unlock the phone. Maybe could make feh/imv display an image on wake with a arrow and words such as swipe up to unlock.

For simplicity could me move some of the commands we are trying to simplify to a menu and swipe actions, i find if the touch screen fails to start (which happens more than i would like) the hardware buttons still work allowing me to fix with a logout + login.

You can find my non-multikey patch at https://paste.sr.ht/~earboxer/7e92f3084752bfb29258a3255bbf5e59252ee4d7 , (might be a good starting place?)

(I like it enough, but miss voldown_two and volup_three)

(we'll, of course also need a documentation patch after we stick with some approach).