Cua Previews Isolated Background Agent Input on Wayland

Cua, which builds open-source tools for agents that operate desktop apps, showed a technical preview at an Omarchy meetup of an agent working in background apps on Omarchy, the Arch Linux desktop built on the Hyprland compositor, while the person at the machine kept their own pointer. The slide attached to the post says plainly that nothing had shipped yet. The post asks the Hyprland community to work with Cua on native support for isolated background input. The thread's further images were not available, so this explanation relies on Cua's public design document for the details.

The problem is specific to how Wayland desktops handle input. In June, Cua's Linux write-up said its driver worked through X11 and XWayland and that native Wayland support was still an opt-in preview. Cua's RFC, first drafted the day after the post and revised since, explains the gap. Wayland apps can know coordinates, but ordinary programs lack a general way to deliver raw input to a different, unfocused window. A virtual pointer or an extra cursor image does not give the agent its own focus or keyboard state, so its clicks can collide with what the person is doing. The proposal is an optional Hyprland plugin that creates separate agent seats, input identities managed by the compositor, so agent input reaches an exact target window while the user's focus, cursor and held keys stay untouched. Anything the plugin cannot deliver safely is refused.

The released version is narrow. Cua's platform documentation says Cua Driver 0.24.0 shipped the plugin off by default and outside the normal installer, qualified only for specific versions of LibreOffice Calc and Inkscape. Chromium, Electron and XWayland apps are not covered. Cua later announced a stable Cua Driver release for Omarchy with a native synthetic cursor in Hyprland, which it says it built working directly with Omarchy and Hyprland developers. The same documentation still lists Hyprland support as experimental, so isolated background input on this desktop is qualified only for the apps Cua has tested.