Modifying your keyboard in Linux

Symbols

I am a Unicode fetishist. As such, I have been bothered for a long time for not being able to type some of the symbols I use quite frequently:

The ellipsis symbol, U+2026 , is probably one of the most underused symbols in existence. Yes, I know it is easy to just type three dots, but at least those of you that know of the semantic web should understand that it is useful to use the proper symbol here. Unfortunately, it looks bad in monospace fonts, so one could consider not using it there. But then, aren’t monospace fonts only meant for technical text, which by its nature shouldn’t contain ellipses?
– and —
The en and em dash, U+2013 and U+2014 , are indispensable if you appreciate nice typography. It is awful to see how the normal hyphen is abused. Em dash is not used often in Dutch, but it is recommended by some style guides in English, although in most situations I like an en dash anyway. See the Wikipedia article on dashes.

All of these can be found in the General Punctuation code chart.

Tools

Doing a web search on modifying your keyboard under Linux will certainly lead you to xmodmap. There are quite some descriptions of it around. The trouble is that it is complex and bothersome. So you want some tool to set this up for you. Both KDE and GNOME offer you possibilities to change some keys, but do not offer you full control.

Luckily, there is XKeyCaps. It is rather old, unfortunately development is no longer active and the interface is not ideal, but it does exactly what I need: you can modify each key individually, with any possible symbol. And best of all: it can write out an xmodmap file which you can use to load those settings automatically.

Procedure

  1. First off, you’ll probably have to install XKeyCaps. Xmodmap is installed on all Linuxes.

  2. Run xkeycaps. You’ll get something like this:
    A screenshot of XKeyCaps, showing my keyboard.

  3. With the right mouse button on a key, you can choose Edit KeySyms of Key:
    Edit a key in XKeyCaps

  4. Choose a KeySym you want, click on it and choose the symbol you want it to output. You can use the key like that immediately. Most probably, you’ll want to use one of the higher KeySyms, like 5 or 6, since they won’t interfere too much with what you’re used to. For example, I edited key 0x3D (/ on a US qwerty) for the KeySym 6 to be ellipsis. The symbols from above can all be found under the Character Set Publishing.

    Of course, you don’t want to do this every time you start your computer, so you want to make those changes last. The way to go is to let XKeyCaps write out an xmodmap file, which you let xmodmap read in at each startup.

  5. Once you’ve edited your keys to your satisfaction, choose the button Write Output in XKeyCaps and confirm (it doesn’t matter whether you choose Changed Keys or All Keys). It will tell you it wrote a file .Xmodmap-localhost to your home directory. Now I am rather unsatisfied with this file, since it contains way too much. We want to keep things under control, so…

  6. Delete the file .Xmodmap , which is a symbolic link XKeyCaps produced, open your favorite text editor, create the file .Xmodmap and copy those lines over which you are interested in from the file XKeyCaps created. You will have to remember which keys you edited, but the names are pretty good mnemonics, so that shouldn’t be too hard.

  7. Open the file .profile in your home directory and add the following lines to it:

    				# Tell xmodmap to read in my own xmodmap file at startup
    xmodmap .Xmodmap
    			

    Then, remove the file .Xmodmap-localhost which XKeyCaps produced for you. Otherwise, xmodmap will ask you for confirmation every time.

    Some desktop environments (Gnome) provide a mechanism which will read in the .Xmodmap file automatically for you at startup. The functionality was buggy for a while, but since openSUSE 11.2, it seems to work.

  8. You can test your current .Xmodmap file at any moment by opening a shell and typing xmodmap .Xmodmap in your home directory. You’ll then immediately be able to test your changes, even on the command line (provided your console font has the relevant symbols.)

Sample .Xmodmap file

I added the symbols discussed above as follows:

Here is my current .Xmodmap :

		keycode 0x0E = 5	percent		5	percent		EuroSign		endash
keycode 0x10 = 7	ampersand	7	ampersand	onehalf			emdash
keycode 0x3D = slash	question	slash	question	questiondown		ellipsis

	

It’s a relic of the funny syntax of xmodmap that you have to repeat the first two each time. The third and fourth value are for rather peculiar keyboard setups. However, if someone knows better, please let me know.

The first is the normal key, the second with Shift , the fifth with AltGr and the sixth with AltGr+Shift .

Have fun experimenting.

Update: I used to have two lines for the curly double quote signs in here as well, but I found out they are already present on the us-international keyboard. They are reachable with AltGr+Shift+[ and AltGr+Shift+] . Well, on Linux, at least. See the XKeyCaps screenshot to know which keys I mean by that (22 and 23).

Another update: Some keyboards have one extra key next to the left Shift key. It usually contains <>|¦, so it is fully superfluous, and you can redefine it at will, e.g. with the following .Xmodmap :

		keycode 0x30 =	dead_acute	dead_diaeresis	dead_acute	dead_diaeresis	singlelowquotemark	doublelowquotemark	apostrophe	quotedbl
keycode 0x5E =	endash	emdash	endash	emdash	ellipsis	periodcentered	

	

[] On most keyboards AltGr is simply marked Alt. In any case, it is the key to the right of the space bar.