Remapping keys in X

[Lourens Veen]

Hi all,

(Please CC any replies to me, I'm not subscribed, thanks!)

I have an HP Compaq Presario 2535 laptop running Ubuntu 4.10, and it has a 
funny keyboard. I have two copies of the \ | key, one to the right of my left 
shift key, and one to the bottom left of the return key.

Currently, I have it configured as a standard 104-key keyboard (XkbModel 
"pc104", XkbLayout "us") and I'm using a Dvorak keymap (somehow, I just 
selected it in the installer, I don't know why the XF86Config-4 file says 
"us" for the layout either...). The \ | key next to my return key works as 
expected, the one next to my left shift key doesn't give any key at all. It 
generates keycodes, but these are never mapped to keysyms.

I'd like to use the key next to the left shift key as \ |, and have the one 
next to my return key act as return, so that I get a nice big J-shaped return 
key rather than a thin q-shaped one. On my previous Slackware install, I did 
this by simply having a ~/.Xmodmap file containing the lines

keysym 94 = backslash bar
keysym 51 = Return

and all was well. If I do this manually from a console (xmodmap -e), it works 
on Ubuntu as well.

However, on Ubuntu, automatically loading this from ~/.Xmodmap doesn't seem to 
work (that is, my ~/.Xmodmap seems to be ignored, and I once (but only once!) 
got a popup when I logged on about there being a ~/.Xmodmap file, and that it 
would be ignored). I browsed through the scripts in /etc/X11 for a bit, and 
noticed that in /etc/X11/gdm/Xsession, the ~/.Xmodmap only gets loaded when 
Xkb is not in use since according to the comment "xkb and xmodmap don't play 
nice together". It appears that I should use ~/.Xkbmap instead, but the 
little bit of documentation I found on that doesn't say anything about 
remapping individual keys. I've tried various things with custom ~/.xinitrc 
and ~/.xsession files as well, but it appears that these are never being run.

There is another little twist in that to be totally "correct", fixing the key 
next to the left shift to do what its label says (keysym 94 = backslash bar) 
should be a systemwide setting (since it's hardware specific), while 
remapping the key next to return to be a return too is a personal preference, 
so it should be user-specific. However, this is effectively a single-user 
machine, so it's not that important.

So to get to the point: what is the standard way of remapping a few individual 
keys in X in Ubuntu?

Thanks in advance,

Lourens