Re: How can we change the keyboard layout? (was: what keyboard do you use?)
Brian Sammon <debian-users-list@brisammon.fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Feb 2024 21:06:30 +0100
> hw <hw@adminart.net> wrote:
>
> > Yes, it's a misunderstanding: How can we change the keyboard
> > layout?
>
> I recently dug into this because I am running Debian on a Chromebook,
> and I wanted to map the Google-key (located next to the A key, where
> you usually expect Caps-Lock to be) to be a Ctrl, for
> Emacs-Correctness. I wanted a solution that would also work when I
> used an external keyboard (which has an actual CapsLock next to the
> A), and would work both in X and in console mode.
>
> The solution I found, which should work when using Wayland as well,
> was to customize the lowlevel scancode-to-keycode mapping that is
> managed by udev. You can have different remappings for different
> keyboard models.
>
> This keymapping system is very powerful, but somewhat ideosyncratic,
> and somewhat poorly documented. And it's an edit-the-configfile
> system; I'm not aware of any GUI config tools for it.
>
> It took me over 2 hours to figure out and set up, after which I had a
> scrambled pile of notes (in a text file) but not the energy to clean
> them up. The next time I do it I expect it'll take me about an hour
> (if the same process still applies) instead of the 15 minutes it
> would take if I did a proper job of documenting it for myself.
>
> Some of the webpages in my notes that I remember being useful are:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Keyboard_input
> https://yulistic.gitlab.io/2017/12/linux-keymapping-with-udev-hwdb/
> (including some of the comments that contain more recent info)
> https://medium.com/@canadaduane/key-remapping-in-linux-2021-edition-47320999d2aa
Many, many thanks for this post Brian. Those links are truly excellent.
> Some somewhat-informative files on my computer were
> /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb (comes with udev)
> /usr/include/linux/input-event-codes.h (comes with linux-libc-dev
> package)
>
> Gotchas include:
> Some things *must* be in lowercase (keycodes, I think?)
> Some things *must* be in uppercase (certain hexadecimal stuff?)
> For best results, triple-check that the case you use is exactly the
> same as the example/sample config files. If you get this wrong, udev
> will just ignore the erroneous parts of your config file, (and you
> might think it just didn't see it) instead of giving an error message.
>
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