On Tue, 2024-02-06 at 01:37 -0500, Brian Sammon wrote: > On Mon, 05 Feb 2024 21:06:30 +0100 > hw <h...@adminart.net> wrote: > > > Yes, it's a misunderstanding: How can we change the keyboard layout? > > I recently dug into this because I am running Debian on a > Chromebook, and I wanted to map the Google-key (located next to the > A key, where you usually expect Caps-Lock to be) to be a Ctrl, for > Emacs-Correctness. I wanted a solution that would also work when I > used an external keyboard (which has an actual CapsLock next to the > A), and would work both in X and in console mode.
Wow that's a very tall order! > The solution I found, which should work when using Wayland as well, > was to customize the lowlevel scancode-to-keycode mapping that is > managed by udev. You can have different remappings for different > keyboard models. > > This keymapping system is very powerful, but somewhat ideosyncratic, > and somewhat poorly documented. At least there is a way :) Have you been able to find the predefined keyboard layouts that can be selected through gnome (or KDE) settings somewhere? I was thinking if I could find those, I might be able to make a copy of one and then modify it they way I need it. Or is that approach not even feasible? I think I rather don't want to change the scancode-to-keycode mapping but would want to change the keycode-to-key mapping like it's done with xmodmap. > And it's an edit-the-configfile system; I'm not aware of any GUI > config tools for it. Well, I prefer that. > Some of the webpages in my notes that I remember being useful are: > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Keyboard_input Hmm, that gives me wev to start with, as the equivalent of xev. Is wayland using this XKB thing? When I run 'setxkbmap -print -verbose 10' I'm getting 'WARNING: Running setxkbmap against an Xwayland server'. Does that mean we're not supposed to do that and/or that we're not supposed to use XKB? > https://yulistic.gitlab.io/2017/12/linux-keymapping-with-udev-hwdb/ > (including some of the comments that contain more recent info) > https://medium.com/@canadaduane/key-remapping-in-linux-2021-edition-47320999d2aa > > Some somewhat-informative files on my computer were > /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb (comes with udev) That's an interesting file indeed! So I want to change that I have to press Shift+` to get a tilde to not having to press Shift. I. e. the key is the first key on top row of my keyboard and has ` and ~ on it, and I want to just press it and get a tilde. Wev says 'key: 49'. That is 0x31 which doesn't show up in this file. Now what? > /usr/include/linux/input-event-codes.h (comes with linux-libc-dev package) According to that, 49 is KEY_N and 'tilde' doesn't exist. > Gotchas include: > Some things *must* be in lowercase (keycodes, I think?) > Some things *must* be in uppercase (certain hexadecimal stuff?) Yeah it says something about that in the comments in 60-keyboard.hwdb. > For best results, triple-check that the case you use is exactly the > same as the example/sample config files. It seems to me that 60-keyboard.hwdb is intended to provide certain keycodes --- i. e. symbols understood by the kernel since they seem to show up in input-event-codes.h --- for a bunch of different keyboards. That seems like the case Loris described with a laptop. Perhaps he would need to specify some (evdev) identifier for that particular keyboard in 60-keyboard.hwdb, along with a mapping for the scancode and the symbol --- and then somehow make a pull request or bug report as described in the file. Then these keys may end up working for everyone with such a laptop. > If you get this wrong, udev will just ignore the erroneous parts of > your config file, (and you might think it just didn't see it) > instead of giving an error message. Hm, that's bad ... Still I think this the wrong place to make changes for my case. I could try something with my keyboard, but I don't understand these evdev designations in 60-keyboard.hwdb, so I won't even be able to specify my keyboard to make settings for it.
