What files does the Gnome Tweak Tool act on (when changing the Typing settings)

gnomekeyboardkeyboard-layoutxmodmap

I've saved the output of

$ xmodmap -pke

in ~/.map1.
Then, I have changed some settings through the Gnome Tweak Tool (say, to keep it simple, I swapped Esc and Caps Lock).
Then I again saved the output of

$ xmodmap -pke

this time into ~/.map2.

~/.map1 and ~/.map2 are different. And they are different exactly in the way I was expecting. The differences correspond to the keys I have changed.

However I was not expecting the following:
I have disabled all the changes made within the Gnome Tweak Tool, and I have loaded map2 with

$ xmodmap ~/.map2

I was expecting the same behavior achieved with the changes made with the Gnome Tweak Tool. But this is not the case. (That is now in the Gnome Terminal there is no difference of behavior whatsoever compared to the default settings. Within applications instead Esc key works correctly as Caps Lock, but it doesn't turn on the light of Caps Lock. And finally Caps Lock key seems to perform both the Esc and Caps Lock function).

So the following question arises: What are the files that the Gnome Tweak Tool is acting on?

It would be extremely useful for me to understand how things work here since I want to perform some changes that the Tweak Tool doesn't allow me to do and I'm not able to achieve them with xmodmap.

Thanks!

Best Answer

The files altered by gnome-tweak-tool are ~/.config/dconf/user (this is the dconf database, a binary file where most user settings are stored) and various other configuration files under ~/.config (these are all text files)

In this particular case - changing the typing settings - gnome-tweak-tool alters the xkb-options in the dconf database. It's easy to check that if you monitor the database with

dconf watch /

and then open gnome-tweak-tool and make CapsLock an additional Esc you'll get an output like

/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options
  ['caps:escape']
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