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I have just upgraded from Fedora 14 with Gnome desktop to Fedora 20 with Mate desktop. Under F14, I previously swapped CapsLock with Control_Left, and Alt_Right with Control_Right. These I did by adding the following lines to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common (excuse the 'xmodmap's on each line)

xmodmap -e 'clear lock'
xmodmap -e 'clear control'
xmodmap -e 'remove mod1 = Alt_R'
xmodmap -e 'add control = Caps_Lock Alt_R'
xmodmap -e 'add mod1 = Control_R'
xmodmap -e 'add lock = Control_L'

Under F14, they work as expected. However, when I copy these to /etc/X11/xinitrc-common under F20, the CapsLock Control_L swap does not happen. Instead, both keys become CapsLock. The Alt_R/Control_R swap does work correctly.

Next, I tried the solution offered in the xmodmap man page, and also here: Remapping Caps Lock with xmodmap doesn't work

xmodmap -e 'remove Lock = Caps_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'remove Control = Control_L'
xmodmap -e 'keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L'
xmodmap -e 'add Lock = Caps_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'add Control = Control_L'

Strangely, CapsLock and Control_L keys are now both Control_L.

Doing all swaps with keycode mappings works like a charm though:

xmodmap -e 'clear Lock'
xmodmap -e 'clear Control'
xmodmap -e 'remove Mod1 = Alt_R'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Control_L'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 37 = Caps_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 108 = Control_R'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 105 = Alt_R'
xmodmap -e 'add Lock = Caps_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'add Control = Control_L Control_R'
xmodmap -e 'add Mod1 = Alt_R'

The original keycodes before the swap are 66=CapsLock, 37=Control_L, 108=Alt_R, 105=Control_R.

I would like to understand why the first two methods would not work. Any ideas?

Community
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user4025526
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1 Answers1

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I had a similar issue when I tried to switch the right control key and the menu key on a laptop (Dell swapped their physical position on the keyboard).

For some reason, the modifier keys have to have two things in place to work. It needs to know that a particular key is Control_R, and it needs to know that the particular key has the Control modifier attached to it.

So I had to swap the keycodes, and then separately remove control function from one key and add it to another. I only needed to do the first step when I experimented with swapping letter keys.

My guess is that the modifier functions are just handled differently by the system.

anotherguy
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