[maemo-developers] developing xkb mappings

[From: Marius Gedminas]

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 12:59:22PM -0400, Tim Tisdall wrote:
>    Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm completely new to some of this stuff...
> 
>    I recently got an iGo Stowaway keyboard and wanted to type with it
> in Dvorak on my N800.  I managed to hack together some changes to the
> xkb files so I can select "English (dvorak)" from the list of keyboard
> layouts, but I was hoping to refine the symbol mapping more to use
> some of the extra keys available.  I need to be able to read the
> scancodes sent by the keyboard, but I haven't been able to figure out
> a way to do that yet in Maemo.  Anyone have any experience with this
> sort of thing?

A bit.

You can use xev to see the keycodes (raw scan codes are irrelevant for
XKB -- they get converted to keycodes that the X server then sees).

Once you have the key code, you can find the key name used in XKB files
by searching through /etc/X11/xkb/, or by running

  $ xkbcomp :0 -|grep '= 65;'
      <SPCE> = 65;

(where 65 is the keycode)

The XKB configuration files are documented somewhere on the web.  This
is the page I've bookmarked, although I'm unable to access it right now
(server timeout):

  http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/index.html

You can load an xkb file with

  $ xkbcomp myexperiment.xkb :0

and if everything goes wrong, reset the keyboard mappings with

  $ setxkbmap

An working ssh session helps a lot, although I suppose the on-screen
virtual keyboard can't be broken by XKB either.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
"...the only place for 63,000 bugs is a rain forest"
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