Making a keymap

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> writes:

> There's the old way and somewhat simpler way (xmodmap), and the new and
> complicated way (xkb).  XKB is somewhat more flexible, and theoretically
> more "correct".  xmodmap is probably easier to achieve (although I'm
> banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my xmodmap
> script to remap an extra ThinkPad key to Alt_R now doesn't have any
> effect).

xmodmap probably gets lowest-level remap and then your window manager
or some other X app overrides it.

> You've had a few responses about xmodmap, so I'll give a couple of links
> about xkb:
>
>   http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/
>   http://pascal.tsu.ru/en/xkb/

Here's some more:

http://www.tsu.ru/~pascal/en/xkb/
    Poor English, but sometimes better than official docs.

http://www.x-docs.org/XKB/XKBproto.pdf      Complete (sic) specification.
http://www.x-docs.org/XKB/XKBlib.pdf

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/*
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/*
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/compiled/README


Configuring that beast makes xmodmap seem user-friendly.  But there's
no doubt GUI tools wrapped around xkb (other than Gnome's and KDE's).
I maybe recall one by Jamie Zawinski.