Today I found this very nice article by Steven Losh in which he presents a couple of productivity boosting keyboard mappings. Among them is a dynamic mapping of the left and right shift keys.
The Idea
When Shift_L or Shift_R are pressed without an additional key they are mapped to '(' and ')' respectively, otherwise they function as usual.
The Problem
He does all of this under OSX. I am trying to achieve the same under Linux. There is no straightforward way for this since as I understand you can't use xmodmap to configure one key for Shift_L alone, and another for Shift when used as a modifier key.
I have googled around a bit and found people trying to do the same under Windows which is apparently possible using AutoHotKey, but I could not find anything for Linux.
Is there a way to solve this under Linux?
Best Answer
Wow! User teika kazura's comment on the original question is quite correct — not only is this effectively a duplicate of that other question, but the answer provided there ("use xcape") solves this problem!
After cloning the xcape repo and compiling (I had to install libXtst-devel on my Fedora box, first), I was able to obtain the exact behavior requested with the following command:
After admittedly-cursory testing, it seems to work extremely well. Nice!
Other Options
If you use the Shift key as a mouse modifier (i.e. if you ever shift-click anything), you'll probably want to include xcape's timeout option and find a comfortable timeout value, so that solo Shift keypresses used in combination with the mouse don't generate spurious parentheses. From the xcape README:
So, by including the
-tflag with a timeout value that works for you, you'll still be able to shift-click with the mouse as long as you hold down Shift for at leasttimeout msmilliseconds.(Credit, again, to teika kazura for pointing out the other question, and also to don_crissti for the original answer there.)