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I have a new bluetooth keyboard, and for some reason the keycode that the escape key returns is 172 instead of 1 (according to 'showkey'; the same codes have 8 added in xkb, so 180 instead of 9). By following this answer I am able to remap ESC to work on keycode 180 instead of 9, so that's great, however I cannot seem to do it twice, i.e. write 

    <ESC> = 9;
    <ESC> = 180;

In this case only the latter setting works. This is sub-optimal because it then breaks the key on the in-built keyboard. So I can get one or the other to work fine, but not both.

What is the correct thing to do about this?

Community
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Ben Farmer
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2 Answers2

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According to An Unreliable Guide to XKB Configuration, you can do this with an alias. That feature is used in xkb/aliases, so you should be able to do something like

alias <ESC> = 9;
alias <ESC> = 180;
Thomas Dickey
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    Arg, well maybe, but that exact thing is bad! It crashed my system and made booting both normally and via recovery mode impossible. I think it was causing a segfault in some xkb library. Had to boot into a rescue console via my install disk and change it back, then got back to my original (much more minor :p) problem. Phew. – Ben Farmer Apr 29 '16 at 15:14
  • Also I don't think aliases work like that, seems more like they are designed to assign e.g. to another symbolic name, not to multiple keycodes. – Ben Farmer Apr 29 '16 at 15:17
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As I understand it, you have to go through two levels of mapping. In the keycodes mapping you give "arbitrary" names (up to 4 chars inside <>) to the numeric scan-codes generated by the keyboard, then in the symbols mapping you say how that key name acts. So you need to have

<ESC> = 9;
<ESC2> = 180;

then an xkb_symbols entry of 

 key <ESC2>  {  [ Escape        ]   };

However, in your case of 2 keyboards, you should really simply set up a different layout for each keyboard instead of making a compatible one. Use xinput -list to get the ids of your keyboards, and for each run setxkbmap -device id ... and the other arguments specifying model, layout, variant, and option for that specific keyboard.

meuh
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