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Simon
Asked: 2020-12-14 07:02:13 +0800 CST

Puzzling phenomena in keymap with xkbcomp

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To achieve a low-level swap of left ctrl key and capsLock key, I used xkbcomp as follows:

First get the present keyboard layout:

 xkbcomp $DISPLAY output.xkb

Then I change the 2 lines in output.xkb from

<LCTL> = 62;
...
<CAPS> = 66;

to

<CAPS> = 62;
...
<LCTL> = 66;

Then run

xkbcomp output.xkb $DISPLAY

to take it into effect. It works perfectly in most desktop applications. But the problem is with vscode. Actually it also works well in the normal mode of vscode, but when I try to change a shortcut in vscode and it prompt me to press new keys to change the shortcut, I pressed the capsLock key on my keyboard and vscode thinks that I pressed ctrl+capsLock simultaneously. This is not what I expected, vscode should not know my capsLock key, it should only know I pressed ctrl key because XServer should only tell vscode that I pressed ctrl key. I think it is because my configuration is not complete so that vscode could still detect my capsLock key. Can anyone tell me how to do a complete swap of ctrl and capsLock? xmodmap should not be the solution because it is based on xkbcomp and with limited function.

keyboard-layout xkb

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Unfortunately, I have the same behavior as you in VSCode, but I am using the following workaround until further notice:

    xkbcomp $DISPLAY output_orig.xkb
xkbcomp $DISPLAY output_mod.xkb

    Edit the file output_mod.xkb according to my ideas.

    If I work in vscode normaly, I use

    xkbcomp output_mod.xkb $DISPLAY

    If I edit keyboard shortcuts, I use before:

    xkbcomp output_orig.xkb $DISPLAY

    Make my changes with original-keys and then set the layout back to key swap:

    xkbcomp output_mod.xkb $DISPLAY

    Ok, that's not very clever but effective for this particular problem.

    /// EDIT ///

    After some research, it seems like there is a better solution especially for the vscode behavior:

    In Terminal:

    nano ~/.config/Code/User/settings.json

    Insert code:

    {
    "keyboard.dispatch": "keyCode"
}

    If code already exists in this file:

    {
    "bla": "blub",
    "keyboard.dispatch": "keyCode"
}

    Restart vscode.

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