Re: keybindings

[Ivan Fernandez <ivan.fernandez@vanderbilt.edu>]

On 2004-04-13, Daniel Asarnow <reve_etrange@pacbell.net> wrote:
> My keyboard is a little messed up.  There is no / and
> ? key.  What happened was that the key was acting
> strangely and so I removed it.  The little rubber
> nipple under the key was flipped.  I tried to flip it
> over but eventually it just ripped.  Now, that key has
> no button over it and I use the / on my keypad and
> copy/paste ?s.  When I boot the computer, there is a
> string of beeps caused by the no-longer-extant slash
> key entering itself until I press any key.  What I
> would like to do is remap the keys so that my now
> useless windoze logo key functions as a / and ? key. 
> I'm not sure how to do this, and have only been able
> to find information on remapping keys in emacs, which
> I don't use (and ?s are useful in things other than
> text editors).

For X, there is xkeycaps (it's also the name of the debian package) and
xmodmap (installed by xbase-clients), install it and read the
documentation.

I am not aware of anything like xkeycaps for the console, but you can
always edit /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz by hand, which is what I ended
up doing with my laptop keyboard.  Research what each keypress gets
translated as with showkeys --keymap (showkeys works *only* in the
console, not under X).  Save your file somewhere and do loadkeys
kmap-file.  When you are happy and nothing is broken (you don't want to
end up with a kernel which boots up an unusable keymap!), you can copy
it to /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz, and then remember doing
dpkg-reconfigure console-common and select the "don't touch keymap"
option (or something like that), otherwise each update of console-common
will overwrite your custom keymap.

Hope that helps

-- 
Ivan Fernández
ivan.fernandez@vanderbilt.edu