keyd and the Modern Space Cadet

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A Modern Space Cadet

Some time ago I read Steve Losh's article A Modern Space Cadet and was sold on it instantly. Having suffered various wrist pains and soreness since I'd been using computers seriously, I was then convinced that I needed to get the PC keyboard working for me instead of me working around it.

At this time I had no real clue about how to solve this issue, so fiddled around with setxkbmap and GNOME's keyboard settings and only really achieved turning caps into ctrl but the rest of the changes were beyond me.

Enter keyd:

keyd

keyd is a system-wide key remapping daemon for Linux. I've been using it recently and now can't really live without it. I've totally ditched whatever ad-hoc remapping I've had in place before and completely switched over to keyd.

keyd works (as far as I can tell) everywhere, so doesn't rely on X11/Wayland running or some desktop environment. Configuration is sensible and (reasonably) obvious.

Here are the contents of my /etc/keyd/default.conf file: 

[ids]

*
-046d:406f:cbff713c

[main]

capslock   = overload(control, esc)
esc        = capslock
leftshift  = overload(shift, S-9)
rightshift = overload(shift, S-0)
rightalt   = leftalt

Better Control/Escape/Caps Lock

I'd been rebinding Caps Lock to escape since before I even used Vim or Linux for that matter and well before stumbling across Losh's article. What I could never accomplish with setxkbmap et al. however was overloading caps to run a dual role as both ctrl and esc; hence the line 

capslock   = overload(control, esc)

Of course, the following line restores the use of the Caps Lock to the (IMO hard to reach) escape key: 

esc        = capslock

Shift Parentheses

Shift Parentheses were a big idea from the Modern Space Cadet I couldn't shake off after reading and had been grumbling about going without from then on. To my delight keyd's overloading handles this without issue: 

leftshift  = overload(shift, S-9)
rightshift = overload(shift, S-0)

This I think is some real magic, and it works exactly as Steve describes. I thought I'd have to rebind the actual parens on my keyboard with noop to get out of an old habit, but after only a few days the shift-parens seem to be already in my muscle memory.

keyd Weirdness

keyd is cool but can exhibit some weirdness. For example, without the line rightalt = leftalt I could no longer M-x in Emacs using the right alt key. There are probably other examples of this for more involved setups but this was most glaring to me.

Admittedly though this could also result from my unusual pairing of physical and digital keyboard layout —typing on a UK keyboard with Linux set to a US layout.