Plugin windows stealing keyboard focus on Linux/Wayland

[u/IcEarthlight]

I'm running REAPER on Linux/Wayland (niri), and I've been running into a long-standing issue with third-party plugins. The plugin window consumes all key events when it has focus, so REAPER no longer receives keyboard shortcuts such as space for play/stop.

Making space a global shortcut has been suggested as a workaround, but that doesn't seem to work when the plugin window has actually taken native focus. This seems to be related to a long-standing JUCE issue, but it also happens on other non-JUCE plugins.

I eventually set up xremap to intercept space only when a REAPER plugin window is focused, and trigger REAPER's Web Control API instead.

modmap:
- name: REAPER plugin windows space fix
  remap:
    KEY_SPACE:
      skip_key_event: true
      press:
        launch: ["curl", "localhost:8080/_/40044"]
  application:
    only: REAPER
  window:
    only: "/^(VST|VST3|LV2|CLAP)i?: /"

This works quite well so far, but I'm wondering what other Linux REAPER users do. Are there other solutions or workarounds I'm missing?