On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

Again, you cannot fix this reliably with xmodmap, you must use Xkb. Your solution will work as long as the interaction *in the X server* between Xkb and xmodmap is not disturbed (luckily for you, even the xorg devs are terrified of disturbing it...).

Xkb is scary. I've looked at it, and I cannot even begin to grasp what I need to do in order to accomplish what a short xmodmap one-liner does. That said, I would of course much prefer to do this the right way, instead of my current hackish solution.

And again, this is not really an xmonad issue. You are fighting against the essential incompatibility between Xkb keymaps and xmodmap with respect to any modifier whose behavior is hardcoded into an Xkb keymap, a problem which has been known for years (the XFree86/xorg folks have tried to deprecate xmodmap many times since Xkb was added because of this incompatibility, but users won't use complex-looking Xkb mechanisms to e.g. swap caps lock and control keys).

I'm not saying this is an xmonad issue as such, I'm saying that when I'm using xmonad, weird stuff happens when I use xmodmap to clear my numlock key. The same weird stuff does not happen when I use KDE or Fluxbox. These two WM's happily accept my .Xmodmap file and numlock stays disabled without other keyboard shortcuts being affected.

This *cannot* be fixed in xmonad; the problem is happening in the guts of the keyboard driver in the X server, and by the time xmonad gets involved it's far too late to deal with it.

I guess I need to find myself an Xkb wizard and bribe him/her to help me kill the numlock key the right way. Does anybody here happen to know such a person? :) Thomas Løcke

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

As for Xkb wizards, there are few such. Not even the xorg devs really understand it that well! See http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/html/index.html (although it seems to not be responding for me right now). It's a bit of a crawling horror, which nobody really understands (else they would have sorted out this mess, since they've known about it for something like ten years) and everyone is afraid to touch. That said, the basic solution is to use that web page as a guide, copy the Xkb keymap definition you're using and remove all the numlock-related parts. (Unfortunately, that may be easier said than done, given the mess that is Xkb.)

Yea, that URL seems somewhat dead at the moment. I did though manage to find this one: http://thomer.com/howtos/kxkb_xmodmap.html That does not seem overly complicated. Whether it can actually be used to completely disable the numlock key I'm not sure, but it is worth a shot. If I can't outright disable the numlock key, maybe I can map it to something else, like this Thomer guy have done with the caps key. All in all this truly is a mess. Disabling a key should be dead-simple. I'm guessing it is issues such as this one that the wayland/mir people are trying to solve? :o) Thomas Løcke

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Paul Fertser wrote:

Here's my config that I can explain :)

Thanks a bunch Paul! This will come in handy when I dive into the dark jungle that xkb appears to be, at least compared to the relative simplicity of xmodmap.

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:44 PM, Jochen Keil wrote:

That's a pity, it was a pretty fine resource. I used it to write my xkb conf. However, I'd like to throw another helpful document on configuring xkb. Not as vast as charvolant, but it helped me a lot too.

http://pascal.tsu.ru/en/xkb/

Not sure if it helps you, but I could send you my config with some comments off-list if you want.

Great link, and yes I would be very grateful for your commented config. :)

Thank you to you all for trying to help me solve this issue. I tried going down the setxkbmap route, but after several hours of failing I went with the simplest possible solution: I re-mapped <NMLK> to a keycode that apparently only triggers on Japanese keyboards. This works a charm, as long as I don't use a Japanese keyboard, in which case I will then toggle numlock on some to me unknown key. :D The "fix" was extremely simple: Edit the <NMLK> = 77; line in /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev and restart X. Numlock is now dead as a doorknob, at least on my Danish keyboard. I understand that this is not really the right way to do things, but since I simply could not figure out how to do this the right way, I'm going to have to settle. And at least I'm not using xmodmap! :o) Thomas Løcke On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Jochen Keil wrote:

Hello,

I'm sending this to the list as well, maybe someone else will find it useful too.

On 20.03.2013 22:07, Thomas Løcke wrote:

...

Great link, and yes I would be very grateful for your commented config. :)

It's not very sophisticated and does only a few simple things: Map 'Menu' to Mod4 and Replace 'Caps Lock' with Escape

I also had Caps Lock to set the 'Ctrl' modifier together with sending the 'Escape' keysym which work fine. However, I didn't like the behaviour so I turned it off again.

It is really important to set the directory structure properly, e.g. like so (this was one source for headache):

.xkb ├── keymap │ └── default -> /home/jrk/.xkb/keymap/default └── symbols ├── capslock -> /home/jrk/.xkb/symbols/capslock └── modmap -> /home/jrk/.xkb/symbols/modmap

xkbcomp is also very peculiar on how it wants to be called. You can try and fiddle around with the include paths, but I remember it being quite cumbersome.

# xkbcomp -I${HOME}/.xkb ${HOME}/.xkb/keymap/default $DISPLAY

symbols/capslock: // Replace Caps Lock with Escape // hidden: a variant that can only be used within the configuration file // partial: not a complete keymap, used to augment/modify other maps partial hidden modifier_keys xkb_symbols "capsescape" { replace key <CAPS> { type[Group1] = "ONE_LEVEL", symbols[Group1] = [ Escape ] // this would additionally set the 'Ctrl' modifier // (notice the comma after 'Escape') // key names like Escape are taken from // /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h without the 'XK_' prefix // symbols[Group1] = [ Escape ], // actions[Group1] = [ SetMods(modifiers=Control) ] }; };

symbols/modmap: // you can have more than definition here, depends on with one you load // in your keymap file partial hidden modifier_keys xkb_symbols "mod1" { modifier_map Mod1 { Menu }; };

partial hidden modifier_keys xkb_symbols "menu" { modifier_map Mod4 { Menu }; };

keymap/default: // kind of a minimal complete definition // required: xkb_{keycodes,types,compat,symbols} default xkb_keymap "default" { // re xkb_keycodes { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" }; xkb_types { include "complete" }; xkb_compat { include "complete" }; xkb_symbols { // need a complete keymap, e.g. altgr-intl include "pc+us(altgr-intl)+inet(evdev)" // our own modifications include "capslock(capsescape)" include "modmap(menu)" }; };

There are also several useful resources on you system where you can look at. Keymaps and modification maps can be found in /usr/share/X11/xkb. Look at symbols/capslock for a good start. Options, etc. can be found in the rules *.lst files.

And finally here's another link I found useful: http://madduck.net/docs/extending-xkb/

I hope this helped you,

Jochen