Ubuntu – Re-mapping keyboard keys

keyboard-layout

I am using a keyboard with the "fn" key. This is on a laptop.

So my FN + Up/down/left/right keys are mapped to brightness/volume. I would much rather them be mounted to page up/down, home/end. And map the other 4 keys to these 2. The page up/down has FN+ them for home/end. Its a shitty keyboard layout but I want to make it work.

Anyone knows how to figure out what the keycodes are and how to remap them?

Version: 10.04 x32

So here are some experiments:

Using xmodmap -pke I discovered that keycodes 122 = vol down, 123 = vol up. And I got all the info for Home/End/Page Up (next), Page Down (prior).

Now when using the vol up keys, there are no events being fired that xev can detect.

I can remap the volume keys to XF86AudioLowerVolume or XF86AudioRaiseVolume, but once I map those two to Home/End (respectively) they don't do anything. xev still does not pick up these events after a remap.

Remap: xmodmap -e "keycode 122 = Home"

Best Answer

Some laptop Fn key combinations are multimedia keys (appearing to the OS as ordinary keys with nonstandard codes), while others trigger ACPI events that eventually reach the OS, and some are just handled by the BIOS and never seen by the OS. The information paths are explained on the Hotkeys/Architecture page on the Ubuntu wiki, complete with diagrams.

The KeyTouch program should handle anything that is seen by the OS, and has a friendly GUI for describing your model and configuring what the keys should do (install the keytouch-editor package as well as keytouch).

If the OS can't see anything when you press the brightness keys, it could be because they're handled directly by the BIOS. The battle is not completely lost — it is in principle possible to hack the BIOS — but the difficulty level is considerably raised.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to clear xmodmap settings

xmodmap has no notion of state, so it has no way to reset state directly. You can simulate it by using xmodmap -pke >.xmodmap.orig before making any changes (although it doesn't save the modifier map, which you would have to save and restore manually) — but it's a bit too late for that.

Modern systems don't generally use xmodmap to configure the keyboard, though. setxkbmap is the modern way to do it; and that does reset bindings when run. So you may be able to use setxkbmap -layout us to reset things to normal. More complete would be to check for the default configuration in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. For example, on my system

jinx:718 Z$ sed -n '/Identifier.*Keyboard/,/EndSection/p' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver  "kbd"
        Option  "XkbModel"      "pc105"
        Option  "XkbLayout"     "us"
        Option  "XkbOptions"    "grp:alt_shift_toggle"
EndSection

The corresponding command is

setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us -option grp:alt_shift_toggle

If there were an XkbVariant entry in the output, you would pass its value with -variant. One thing to watch out for is that options are handled specially: you can only set one option per -option parameter, and you need to use -option '' to reset parameters first. So to fully reset when there is something like XkbOptions "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp:ctrls_toggle" you would need

setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us -option '' -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -option grp:ctrls_toggle

Ubuntu – How to remap a key combination to a single key

You can use xbindkeys to grab the keys and xvkbd to send keys.

Create a file .xbindkeysrc in your home directory and paste this text:

"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Delete]'"
  Alt + BackSpace

"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Home]'"
  Alt + Left

"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Page_Down]'"
  Alt + Down

Then start xbindkeys and it should work. Probably you want to map more keys, then after you edited the .xbindkeysrc you can run pkill -HUP xbindkeys to send a HUP signal to xbindkeys (or kill xbindkeys and start it again).

To see the key names that xbindkeys sees, you can run xbindkeys -mk (man xbindkeys has more info).

To see the key names that xvkbd knows, have a look in /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h (maybe someone else knows a better method?).

xbindkeys only runs until your X session ends, so you probably want to put it in your startup (auto-start) programs.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to clear xmodmap settings

Ubuntu – How to remap a key combination to a single key

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