I have a japanese keyboard that has additional keys (henkan, muhenkan, hiragana_katakana – keycodes 100, 102 and 101) and I want to remap these keys to something different. I have created a completely new symbol file (without any includes) with these lines: key <MUHE> { [ a, b ] }; key <HENK> { [ c, d ] }; key <HKTG> { [ e, f ] }; But it is not working fully. Here is what happens: * If I press MUHE then nothing is typed in, xev reports that Muhenkan was pressed (which is wrong, it should be mapped to "a") * If I press Shift+MUHE then letter "b" is typed in – correct! This means that there is no error in my config. Exactly the same thing happens with the other keys – bare key is not remapped, but shift+key works correctly. Since I can remap any other key (alt, ctrl, whatever) without any problems, and since I can set shift+<henk|muhe|hktg> keys correctly, I am suspecting that it is a bug in xkb. For now, the workaround is to use xmodmap: xmodmap -e 'keycode 100 = a' I was struggling with this problem for two days, there is almost no information on that topic, but it seems like there is another mention of this problem here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=966384&p=6087155#post6087155
And all of sudden I figured it out myself. Look: $ setxkbmap ef -print xkb_keymap { xkb_keycodes { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" }; xkb_types { include "complete" }; xkb_compat { include "complete+ledcaps(group_lock)" }; xkb_symbols { include "pc+ef+inet(evdev)" }; xkb_geometry { include "thinkpad(intl)" }; }; The most important part is this: "pc+ef+inet(evdev)" So I guess it loads up pc, then ef (my layout), then inet(evdev). No matter how hard I try to set something in ef it will be overriden from inet(evdev). The only way to solve it is to comment out these lines in inet (under evdev section, of course): key <HKTG> { [ Hiragana_Katakana ] }; key <HENK> { [ Henkan ] }; key <MUHE> { [ Muhenkan ] }; It works! Hooray! Now, this is wrong. It should be possible to modify any key from the layouts, I don't think there is any reason to hardcode some of the keys by overriding them. So the issue is still there, it is just a bit different from what I thought initially. I'll change the title of this report.
How about overriding inet after it has been read? So, instead of having "pc+ef+inet(evdev)" you would have "pc+ef+inet(evdev)+special(lettering)", where the symbols/special file contains this: partial xkb_symbols "lettering" { key <MUHE> { [ a, b ] }; key <HENK> { [ c, d ] }; key <HKTG> { [ e, f ] }; }; Sure, your nice keyboard layout will not be in a single file any more, but at least you don't have to change system files (that may get overwritten by an update).
For that, you can even introduce XKB option and add it to the rules.
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