Re: ~/.Xmodmap and Gnome

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 10:55:07PM +0200, Ole Laursen wrote:

 > Look, I'm not saying that disabling .Xmodmap necessarily is a good
 > idea, but there is probably some reason why it was done (and that
 > reason is probably not to annoy as many people as possible). I don't
 > know why. Go ask the people who did the change.

 In fact, it's what I thought...  looking at ~/.gkb_default.xmm (which
 is loaded at some point after starting gnome-settings-daemon), it's
 full of:

 keycode 197 =
 keycode 198 =
 ...

 i.e. "clear whatever is there" which is in principle a good idea,
 since it's difficult to just "delta" the changes and hope that
 something reasonable comes out of it (which is what the XKB layouts
 do), but it's just another case of "the user is dumb, we are not,
 therefore we do whatever is best for the user".

 > So instead of continuing hacking around these problems with .Xmodmap
 > (as everyone has been doing until now)

 Which is _exactly_ what GNOME does backstage... it just offers a nice
 GUI to set this whole thing up, but they are doing nothing different.
 The problem is, suprise, surprise, that this kills customizability.

 From what I can tell
 /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/layout/command_0 would do the
 trick.  Set it to something like ~/bin/sensible-gmodmap, and put
 something like:

#!/bin/sh

for xmodmap in ~/.gkb_default.xmm ~/.xmodmap ; do
    if [ -f "$xmodmap" ] ; then
        xmodmap "$xmodmap"
    fi
done

 in there.

 I'm not sure what's the effect of command_1

 But I have the feeling that the solution lies somewhere along this
 path.

 Marcelo