Reassign broken Esc key in 19.1

ericlindellnyc · 06-03-2019, 02:06 PM

Suggestions I found online to reassign keys in Linux either don't apply

to Mint 19.1; or
to ESC key.

How to re-assign my broken Esc key to any other key combination?
Thanks.

I have Cinnamon desktop.

hydrurga · 06-03-2019, 02:59 PM

Just so I understand correctly, your Esc key is broken and you want to program another key or key combination to generate Esc?

ericlindellnyc · 06-03-2019, 06:12 PM

hydrurga · 06-04-2019, 05:34 AM

Ok, in that case, for a while (until I bought myself a new keyboard and installed it in my laptop), I had a very intermittent "i" key so reprogrammed the F9 key to produce "i"'s in a Linux Mint 19 system. Here's how I did it:

I first ran the following command and pressed the relevant keys to find out the keycodes for the "i" key and the "F9" key:

Code:

xev | grep -A2 --line-buffered '^KeyRelease' | sed -n '/keycode /s/^.*keycode \([0-9]*\).* (.*, \(.*\)).*$/\1 \2/p'

This resulted in "i": 31 and "F9": 75. In your case, on my system, "Escape" is 9.

I then ran the following to determine the exact text in the lines relating to both these keys:

Code:

xmodmap -pke

After that, I ran the following command to create a file to override the specific xmodmap setting for F9, populating it with the "i" line obtained above but replacing its keycode with the keycode for F9. I then saved and closed the file.

Code:

sudo xed ~/.Xmodmap

I tested this with:

Code:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

This setting gets lost on reboot/shutdown so in order to change it on every system startup, I added the following command to my startup applications:

Code:

bash -c "sleep 10 && /usr/bin/xmodmap /home/$USER/.Xmodmap"

Let me know how you get on.