Bug 96621

Summary:	bind modifier keys separately when pressed alone (similar to xcape)
Product:	Wayland	Reporter:	eisfreak7
Component:	libinput	Assignee:	Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium	CC:	jplatte+freedesktop, peter.hutterer
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description eisfreak7 2016-06-21 18:57:25 UTC

I like to bind some of my modifier keys to different keys when pressed on their own, as opposed to being pressed in combination with another key.
A (very popular) example is: caps lock serves as escape when pressed alone, ctrl when in combination.

I use xcape (https://github.com/alols/xcape) to achieve this, but there is (as far as I can see) currently no possibility to archive this with wayland, and it doesn't look like there will be (https://github.com/alols/xcape/issues/67).

Not sure where it would be best to implement this, I created an issue for a window manager (https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/719) and was redirected here.

Is this possible to do with libinput?

Comment 1 Peter Hutterer 2016-06-24 04:07:02 UTC

in theory yes, but libinput doesn't handle keys at that level. libinput merely forwards the kernel key codes, actual interpretation is done in the caller (i.e. the compositor). so libinput doesn't have a concept of "modifiers", they're all just keys.

this is something you'll have to implement in the compositor

Comment 2 eisfreak7 2016-06-24 05:36:25 UTC

Thank you for your response.
A unified solution would have been great of course, but then I'll just have to hope a compositor will implement this.

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