Reading through the comments, it seems like you’ve got ydotool working, but it may not have all the capabilities you want. I created a tool that seems like it could do everything you need, it has a couple of prerequisites, but it runs as a python script and doesn’t require super user to work.

If you wanted to give it a go, I’d be happy to help as much as I can; I use it daily on Debian 12 with Wayland, so I’m pretty confident it should work for you on Ubuntu. Admittedly, it’s still rough around the edges, but it can definitely handle mapping ‘Alt + E’ to type an email address.

https://gitlab.com/sincere-untimely-yesterday-group/custom-input-remapping/-/tree/7d64cfd2cb70c5acc19ba7536b91f9558e69b9ce/

I didn’t get one, strangely - here’s the article:

Denmark’s KFC restaurants shut down amid food safety revelations Michael Barrett Published: 25 Jun, 2025 CET. Updated: Wed 25 Jun 2025 10:21 CET

Denmark’s KFC restaurants shut down amid food safety revelations Illustration photo. KFC is to close its restaurants in Denmark until a new franchise operator is found following reports of poor food safety. Photo by Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash

The 11 branches of fast food chain KFC in Denmark are to be shut down until further notice while the company looks for a new franchise operator.

Each of the 11 Danish branches of American fast food chain KFC are to close on a temporary basis after broadcaster DR exposed bad food hygiene practices at the restaurants.

The company’s West European head office told DR it was shutting shop in Denmark until a new company is found to take over the franchise. The current franchise owner is Isken ApS, which will not continue.

That comes after DR’s Kontant programme spoke with former employees who described how expiry dates on chicken used in the restaurants were extended.

If thawed chicken wasn’t used by its expiry date, new labels were printed and placed on the packaging, the former workers said.

The company reportedly told DR on June 10th that this was a breach of the terms and obligations set out in its franchise agreements.

KFC in Denmark has restaurants in Rødovre, Greve, Tilst, Horsens, Vejle, Herning, two in Odense and three in Copenhagen.

The restaurants also fared poorly in recent inspections by food hygiene authorities.

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s inspection unit visited each of the 11 KFC restaurants across the country in early June, with every restaurant given either a “neutral” or an “unhappy” smiley rating on the agency’s scale for hygiene standards.

None of the KFCs in Denmark received the top rating, which is a “happy” smiley.

In total, the authority issued four unhappy smileys and seven neutral ones following the June 2nd inspections.

The “smiley” rating system has been used by the food authority since 2001 to help consumers gauge hygiene standards at cafés, shops and restaurants.

An inspection report from KFC Odense noted signs of mould-like growth, dust accumulation and cobwebs.

“The fridge used for storing chicken was unclean, with marinade or food residues on surfaces and trays,” the report stated according to DR.

Inspectors at the Amager branch in Copenhagen meanwhile found bags of chicken placed next to the dishwashing area, with temperatures variously measured at 13.1°C, 13.7°C and 14.9°C. The ambient temperature was 24.2°C.

Staff told inspectors that the meat would be discarded immediately, according to the report.

Success! This is certainly a niche issue, but since it’s taken a pretty lengthy amount of research to resolve, I thought I’d add some resources here in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

After exploring others’ recommendations, I’ve saved hardware solutions for tinkering in the future and was also not able to find a way to temporarily disable mouse movement through gnome. I finally landed on python-evdev as my solution. With this, you can read input from one or more devices simultaneously, create a virtual input device to write events to on-demand, and (maybe most importantly) retain exclusive access to the original hardware devices to absorb their input. I’ll also shout out evsieve which lead me to python-evdev. The python-evdev documentation is quite thorough, and it’s quite a custom solution based on your own needs, so I’m not going to go into great detail on my python script - but it’s only 27 lines long, nothing major.

Be aware that you may need to write some udev rules to allow access to the physical devices and to allow the virtual device to be created. This was the easiest part for me to find help with, so I’ll leave some abridged copy/paste details below:

Find your device Vendor and Product IDs cat /proc/bus/input/devices | more

Write a udev rule (I used priority 71) to allow access to the device: SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="", ATTRS{idProduct}=="", TAG+="uaccess"

Add a very poor udev rule to allow a virtual device to be created by python-evdev (there’s probably a much better way to do this): KERNEL=="uinput", SUBSYSTEM=="misc", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660"

This is an interesting idea, thanks for the suggestion! I’m much less experienced working with hardware solutions like this, but this might be a good chance to learn something different. Anecdotally, it seems like there may be some issues with anti cheat software that blocks Arduino input, but that may not end up being a problem for me.

I’ve read through a few different projects and it certainly seems like this would work. Are there any specific projects you would recommend that might help get me on the right path? I’m going to try to work with a custom command plus key bind as a primary solution, but it would be nice to try a couple different approaches.

Thanks very much for explaining a bit about Sway and compositors in general - that makes more sense now!

I did find the keyboard shortcuts exactly as you described, that’s something I didn’t know about before! Unfortunately, I don’t think the mouse speed setting is exactly as it sounds: Pointer speed for mice. Accepted values are in the [-1..1] range (from “unaccelerated” to “fast”). A value of 0 is the system default. It looks like it’s related to the acceleration, not the base movement speed. When I tested, even a value of -1 only slows the mouse instead of stopping it completely. There may be something else that will work, knowing that a custom shortcut exists that can execute a command does open up options I haven’t looked at yet.