[SGVLUG] Remapping keys in X? Howtos? Leads?

[juanslayton at dialup4less.com]

Terry Hancock wrote ..
> I'm getting tired of copying and pasting certain unicode characters in
> X applications, and I'm starting to wonder if I could just re-configure
> my
> keyboard to generate them at a keystroke.
> 
> E.g. it'd be nice if I could type "typographer's left single quote" (‘)
> by hitting 'Alt+`' (Alt+Backtick) for example.
> 
> And so on.  I have about a dozen characters I need to type frequently
> that aren't in the standard layout.
> 
> I figure something like this must happen when people define new 
> language-bindings
> for keyboards, but I have a specific set of characters I want to bind,
> and I don't
> really want to change my usual USA keyboard bindings (beyond the few tweaks
> I want, I mean).
> 
> I also want to get Japanese Kanji input working for all my apps, but (I
> think)
> that's a separate problem (and I found a HOWTO for exactly that part).
> 
> It'd also be kind of cool to find a way to switch keyboard-mappings 
> on-the-fly,
> like I can within Yudit (but at the X or KDE level, so it would work for
> all
> (or most) of my apps).
> 
> I've been looking for the right way to tackle this, but I've found 
> several leads
> with Google, and I'm not sure which to follow up on:
> 
> xmodmap:
>     Seems to allow remapping the keyboard, but I'm not sure if it can handle
>     generic unicode substitutions (mostly for things like swapping 'delete'
>     and 'backspace'?).
> 
> KDE: Control Center --> Regional & Accessibility --> Keyboard Layout
>     Lets me change layouts, but I don't see how to create one.  Mentions
>     'xkb', but I haven't found that.
> 
> Xinput
>     I know that the Kanji server grabs the keyboard input and potentially
>     takes over when it's called for, but I don't know if this is related
> to my
>     goal here or not.
> 
> Also, I may well have missed something.  I find that localizing queries
> to 'X' is a real pain, since you get far more hits for 'OS X' and other
> instances
> of 'X'.  It's just too common a string.  So you have to know a better 
> keyword
> to find what you're looking for, and I guess I don't.
> 
> I remember 'way back when' that the old Macs had an application that would
> display the keyboard graphically with the currently-mapped characters for
> each key.  If you could change the layout graphic to match different 
> keyboards
> and make each key remappable, that would be a really cool Linux app --
> I
> wonder if someone has tried that already. (?)
> 
> If they haven't, I wonder how I could write one.  I could write code with
> simpletal, SVG, and PIL to display it if I knew how to get and set the
> mappings themselves (in Python, of course, but if there's any way to do
> it,
> I'm sure I get figure out how to get it into Python).
> 
> Anyway, HOWTO, RTFM (with reference), etc. would be just fine -- I just
> need a better lead to follow.
> 
> Thanks,
> Terry
> 
> -- 
> Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com

Check the info file for 'loadkeys.'  I've never used it, but it looks like it will do what you want.

John

__________________________________________________________________________________

Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense,
Such a dependency of thing on thing,
As e'er I heard in madness.
                         -Measure for Measure