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From: crs@lanl.gov (Charlie Sorsby)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Keyboard remapping
Date: 12 Nov 1996 02:14:41 GMT
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 69
Message-ID: <568mih$156@newshost.lanl.gov>
Reply-To: crs@hamlet.lanl.gov
NNTP-Posting-Host: hamlet.lanl.gov
[I will appreciate if any follow-ups are Cc:ed to
crs@hamlet.lanl.gov because I may be away for a few days fairly
soon and I'd hate to have a great response expire before I could
read it. Thanks.]
Well...
Some time ago I figured out how to remap the keyboard under X to
compensate for the asinine layout of PC keyboards by moving the
stupid <CAPS-LOCK> key to the right <CTRL> key and vice versa.
Great! Now, as long as I run X, the control key is where god
intended it to be and I can type things like backspace and escape
without having to reach clear across the keyboard by using ^H and
^[ respectively and other neat things like that.
But any time I, for whatever reason, choose to run FreeBSD (3.1.5R)
without X, I'm out of luck. Fingers with ingrained habits due to
years of finding the control key where the stupid caps lock is hit
caps lock most of the time when I want control. Sigh...
So, I look around and find kbdcontrol and
/usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.iso.kbd (I assume that is what is
being used by default) and think, Hey! this will fix my problem.
So I use kbdcontrol -d > mykeymap in my home directory and swap the
key scan codes for the two keys and, lo and behold, the effective
control key is in the right place when I'm not running X. Yay!!!
So, I start X and... Guess what? My previous fix under X is now
broken. Sigh...
Well, more time with man pages and looking through various files
and I find
"! This file presupposes that the keyboard is in the default state, and
! may malfunction if it is not."
in my .Xmodmap file where I had previously fixed the stupid
keyboard layout under X. And, of course, the effect of kbdcontrol
spans logins so that it doesn't revert to default when I log out
which would be OK because I could simply log out and back in before
running X. I could live with that but, no.... :(
Well, I hacked my .login and .logout files as a work around. In
.login, I ask myself if I want to start X and use a switch statement
that depends upon the reply. In the case selected if I tell it not
to run X, it runs "kbdcontrol -l $HOME/mykeymap" and in the case
selected if I tell it to run X it does not. In my .logout I have
the line "kbdcontrol -l /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.iso.kbd" to
put things back to default. Kludgy but it seems to be working.
I haven't tried (yet) getting rid of my .Xmodmap and seeing if the
kbdcontrol change is propagated to X but I'm not optimistic.
Something (that I've forgotten) seemed to imply that that would not
work.
My question is: Is there a better way?
Clearly a sane keyboard layout would be the ideal but that is not
an option (unless a Sun Type 5 Unix keyboard would work and someone
would like to donate one. :) that is available.
Thanks for reading a too-long post and for any information you may
be able to provide.
--
Best,
Charlie "Older than dirt" Sorsby "I'm the NRA!"
crs@swcp.com crs@hamlet.lanl.gov Life Member since 1965