- a simple gui keymap setter for Xorg
This utility allows you to set the keyboard mapping for the Xorg windowing system. It was designed for Arch Linux but may work on other GNU/Linux systems.
It can set the keyboard mapping temporarily, for the current session, using setxkbmap, but it can also set a permanent mapping by writing a configuration file, %(xconf)s. This feature has been designed around the changes introduced in Xorg-1.8.
To keep it simple not all the options which are available for keyboard configuration may be set by this utility, it just allows setting of the basic models, layouts and variants (as found in the %(xrules)s file).
xorg keymaps can be set immediately, just for the present session, by clicking 'Set temporarily for this user'.
To make the settings here persistent, on a global level (for all users), click on 'Set permanently for all users'.
To make the setting persistent for just the current user, click on 'Set permanently for just this user'. However, the mechanism for this latter setting is dependent on the configuration of the underlying system, so it cannot be guaranteed that this will work for you. Setting a persistent keymap for just the present user overrides any global keymap, but requires that the script ~/%(uset)s be run at session start. Depending on how Xorg is started, one could call the script from .xinitrc in the user's home directory, or by putting a call in an autorun folder.
Clicking the 'Clear user setting' button removes the setxkbmap call within the ~/%(uset)s script, so that in future the global keymap setting will not be overridden.
'Quit' exits without making any (further) changes.
The configuration file (%(xkmconf)s) may need adjusting for non-Arch distributions, and also for Arch systems it may be desirable to adjust some setting or other. For example, it is possible to use sudo for authentication instead of su.
Sometimes it is desirable to make a few little modifications to the chosen key mapping (one particular case is the highly aggravating Caps-Lock key). This can be accomplished by the xmodmap program. However, when a key mapping is changed by setxkbmap the xmodmap modifications are lost (for the current session).
If these modifications are placed in a file known to xkmap (the locations can be changed in the xkmap configuration file, %(xkmconf)s), they will be reapplied after xkmap performs a change. Two file locations are supported, one for all users (%(xmodmapg)s) and one for the current user (%(xmodmapu)s). Both may be present, the global one will be applied first.
An example xmodmap input file and a desktop file for an autostart folder are supplied in the xkmap package, in the 'xmodmap' directory (%(xmodmap)s).
The xev program might be useful for discovering the keycodes associated with individual keys.
This program was written for the larch project: http://larch.berlios.de
It is free software, released under the GNU General Public License.
© 2009-2010 Michael Towers