Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

[Wavewash]

I've recently converted my laptop to Kubuntu and love my Linux experience. Now this question may be very naive but I honestly feel I must be doing something wrong. Emacs and VI seem to have such a following, I've been using both. What I've found though is that I feel so awkward hitting the crtl key!

I'm not sure if I'm reaching for it weird but the fact that I have to move left wrist back and then hit another key makes it feel wrong. I would be fine with it but use of VI and Emacs requires you to hit ctrl all the time. Does this become more natural over time? (I've been editing with VI and Emacs for a couple weeks now). How do you place your hands? I'd love some feed back. Thanks!

[kubicle]

Re: Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

One option (which I use myself) is to use the CapsLock key as an additional Ctrl key (or alternatively switch CapsLock and Ctrl Keys).

After all, the CapsLock is a pretty useless key at such a nice position

You can do this globally (xkb) with SystemSettings>Regional&Language>KeyboardLayout>Xk bOptions>'Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl'

[Wavewash]

Re: Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

Aha, I'm going to try that out! Thankyou!

[Wavewash]

Re: Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

I was successfully able to swap my ctrl key for my capslock key using the regional settings. But in the process of turning on the enabling the xkb the volume buttons on my laptop seized to work. So after doing some research I found that perhaps I could just remap the keyboard via
xmodmap.

I created .xmodmap in my home directory and created the following file:

! swap left control and caps lock

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L

keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L

add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L

and then tried to get my changes to go:
xmodmap ~/.xmodmap

But got errors:
xmodmap: /home/wavewash/.xmodmap:3: bad keysym in remove modifier list 'Caps_Lock', no corresponding keycodes
xmodmap: /home/wavewash/.xmodmap:7: bad keysym target keysym 'Caps_Lock', no corresponding keycodes
xmodmap: 2 errors encountered, aborting.

not sure if I'm typing these incorrectly as they seem to correspond:
shift Shift_L (0x32), Shift_R (0x3e)
lock Control_L (0x42)
control Control_L (0x25), Control_R (0x6d)
mod1 Alt_L (0x40), Alt_L (0x7d), Meta_L (0x9c)
mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d)
mod3
mod4 Super_L (0x7f), Hyper_L (0x80)
mod5 Mode_switch (0x5d), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x71), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x7c)


any help would be appreciated.

[Wavewash]

Re: Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

I got it to work.

Changed my .xmodmap file to read:

keycode 66 = Control_L
clear Lock
add Control = Control_L

and then from command line:
xmodmap .xmodmap

and that did the trick

Now I'm trying to get that to run when I log in.

I tried to put "xmodmap .xmodmap" in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

changing that to

. /etc/X11/Xsession
xmodmap ./home/wavewash/.xmodmap

but that didn't work. So then I tried putting it in /home/wavewash/.bashrc at the bottom which also didn't work. I'm sort of lost as to how to get this command to run on startup.

Thanks!

[kubicle]

Re: Hand Postion on Keyboard for VI and Emacs

If you rename it to .Xmodmap (case-sensitive, ~/.Xmodmap), it should run at X startup via '/etc/X11/Xsession.d/80ubuntu-xmodmap'