I have my ~/.Xmodmap loaded at startup. I love it. Really, it's a very dear feature/mechanism to me.

However, I keep losing those changes. I wrote a script and set up a keyboard shortcut to reload ~/.Xmodmap because I have to do that multiple times every day. Something keeps killing my custom keyboard layout and reverting it to defaults.

Why does that happen? Is there something I can do about it?

Note: it's a USB keyboard. I've been using Linux for long enough to remember a time when USB media devices would be disconnected at random, including external hard disks during backup sessions. Maybe it's related.

TIA

A web search for "xmodmap save changes" turns up a number of articles and forum threads that might be helpful.

This one looks like a good place to start: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...nges-permanent

That thread is about keeping the changes after sleep/resume. My case does not involve any sleep/resume. In fact, my changes are always intact after sleep/resume. I lose my changes during regular use.

I have similar problems whenever I connect/disconnect an external keyboard - Xorg reverts to the server defaults (set somewhere in /etc/X11). Just like you I had a script that would reapply these settings until I figured out how to make them under /etc/X11 instead.