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development is no longer active and the interface is not ideal, but it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
-
First off, you’ll probably have to install XKeyCaps. Xmodmap is
installed on all Linuxes.
-
Run xkeycaps. You’ll get something like this:
-
With the right mouse button on a key, you can choose Edit KeySyms
of Key
:
-
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.
-
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…
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
- Ellipsis comes at AltGr+Shift+/[∗]
, easily reachable. The dead-hook which was there is used in
Vietnamese only.
- En dash comes at AltGr+Shift+5, which isn’t used.
- Em dash comes at AltGr+Shift+7, which contains
dead_horn, another dead key that only works with o and u and is only
used in Vietnamese, too.
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
