HP Dragonfly

[2022-04-29 08:34]

After spilling coffee over my beloved 2015 MBPro I bought a non Mac, since on Linux anyway. The HP Dragonfly convinced me because of super small and light but also the best keyboard in the store.

"Capslock -> Esc: Drastic Changes Require Drastic Measures"

Finally realised the escape key relocation to Capslock - u need it all the time in vim an this is even easier (and more universal, e.g. for fzf) than jj or jk bindings.

So: setxkbmap -option "caps:swapescape" . Done.

Nope.

Simply mapping the escape key was not sufficient to retrain 30years of muscle memory - my pinky continued to hit that escape key all the time. So: I physically removed the escape key => pinky finger got shocked every time it hit that hole!

With this, me and my left pinky finger immediately (about one day) learned the new position. Can actually re-insert the keycap again :-)

"Alt-Gr -> Up: Required Low Level Approach (xkbcomp)"

Then a problem was the up arrow key: It is physically super small and hard to reach in "vim position" - so I remapped it to the key next to space, which I can reach with the thumb: Alt_Gr

That was easy: xev to find keycode (108) for Alt_Gr and then remap to Up via: xmodmap -e "keycode 108 = Up"

But then this bit me: A bug in a rust lib.

showkey -a did reveal, at Alt_GR presses, in alacritty different output than in st or kitty - and no up arrow was processed.

xkbcomp to the rescue: Here we modify the state of the X11 Server itself, regarding the layout and functioning of the physical keyboard.

1. Export the current state:

$ xkbcomp $DISPLAY output.xkb # cleartext file - but complex

1. Modify (see below) then upload again:

$ xkbcomp modified.xkb $DISPLAY

Modifications:

In the file we have in the beginning all keycodes (like 111) and their "functional name" (like "UP") within that file:

    <RALT> = 108;
    <LNFD> = 109;
    <HOME> = 110;
      <UP> = 111;
 

But simply saying <UP> = 108 did not work - the RALT functional name is referenced in many places, we need it mapped to a keycode. Swapping 108 and 111 in the file and uploading was accepted by the server, but then we lost the real Up arrow key, was now really Right Alt.

So we did this:

1. Picked an unused keysym (XF86RFKill - which was at Key with functional name, keycode 255 <I255>)
2. Swapped it with 108 (our physical Alt_GR) and then
3. Then use xmodmap to define a keysym for this one to Up:

/tmp ❯ diff orig.xkb input.xkb # our changes
103c103
<     <RALT> = 108;
---
>     <I255> = 108;  
250c250
<     <I255> = 255;
---
>     <RALT> = 255;
/tmp ❯ xkbcomp input.xkb $DISPLAY # upload
/tmp ❯ xmodmap -e 'keysym XF86RFKill = Up' # remap to Up

Done. Up Arrow AND Alt_GR now behaving equal :-)

Refs:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension