Go to TogaWare.com Home Page. GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams
Duck Duck Go



CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED SURVIVAL GUIDE

Mapping a Key

First find the keycode of the key you wish to map. Do this by running xev and press the key you wish to map (e.g., the Windows key) and look for the keycode:

KeyPress event, serial 22, synthetic NO, window 0x4000001,
    root 0x26, subw 0x0, time 24756 22836, (129,34), root:(139,245),
    state 0x58, keycode 115 (keysym 0xffed, Meta_L), same_screen YES,

Create /home/kayon/.Xmodmap and map the keycode to any unused keysym. For example, assuming your keyboard has function keys F1–F12 then generally F13 and beyond are not used, so lets use F15:

  keycode 115 = F15

For a complete list of keysyms, see /usr/X11R6/include/X11/keysymdef.h. (You omit the XK_ prefix when using them with xmodmap).

Run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap. You can do this interactively instead with:

  $ xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = F15"

Now you should be able to bind F15 to any action with, for example, metacity.

Even better, sawfish, for example supports custom modifier keys (i.e., modifiers apart from Ctrl, Alt, and Shift- and knows about Hyper). You can map the left windows key:

  keycode 115 = Hyper_L
  add Mod2 = Hyper_L

Then use Hyper_L for all bindings related to the window manager (thus freeing Ctrl and Alt-based bindings). This makes it a perfect window manager key.

I end up with /home/kayon/.Xmodmap containing:

  keycode 115 = Hyper_L
  add mod3 = Hyper_L
  keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L
  add mod1 = Meta_L


Support further development by purchasing the PDF version of the book.
Other online resources include the Data Science Desktop Survival Guide.
Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science.
Popular open source software includes rattle and wajig.
Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984.
Copyright © 1995-2020 Togaware Pty Ltd. Creative Commons ShareAlike V4.