KDE and keyboard mapping
 

ok, i have my own custom us.key map file that simply swaps capslock and left-control keys (when are they going to move that useless caps lock key outta the way on all keyboards!?).

restart keymap and everything is peachy.

then i fire up X/kde and my keys are switched back around.

something in kde messes with my key mapping and i don't like it one bit. i don't know the commands that kde uses or what configuration files are relevant, so i just poke around in the improving but still painfully incomplete KDE GUI for anything keyboard related. i've mucked with accessibility options mainly. those settings don't seem to do anything that sticks, so i just set them back to defaults.

any idea whats mucking with my keymapping? i had an .xmodmap file in there for a while but deleted it; other than that haven't any of my own conf files that might be doing it.

driving me nuts. and i wish folks like KDE and Redhat would not muck with this stuff so much. seems like i have to relearn the interface anytime i upgrade kde or redhat.

man, i'd think this would be a relatively simple question for anyone familiar with KDE. no responders???

i never had this problem when i used gnome. it's little stuff like this that kept me from switching to kde sooner. but i'm trying to figure these issues out now rather than just continuing using gnome, which seems to be losing steam :)

found out the latest X fucks with your keys pretty good when you fire it up.

there's are new values in the keyboard input device section. as always with X config, not sure what any of them do, but there is one that lets you swap caps/cntrl:

Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"

even if you have already swapped them in your us.kmap file (or whatever you use), X will mess up your keyboard again.

damnit, why do they got to keep messing with stuff? LEAVE STUFF ALONE WHEN YOU RELEASE THE NEXT VERSION!!! that goes for all developers and especially the folks at gnome, kde and xtra xtra especially to Redhat. Don't muck with default settings. Don't change the users environment so dramatically that he regrets upgrading. don't mess with the keyboard, the menu layouts, the applications menus, the base packages, etc...

end of rant...

I don't know for sure, but this may be more X-related than KDE. Look at 'man xmodmap'; it seems to be able to do what you want.

No, thinking on it more, KDE seems to have its hand in there somewhere. I've been trying to customise the keyboard repeat interval and rate in KDE, which plain doesn't work in Mandrake 9.1 (or is it KDE 3.1?) I can get this to what I want (200ms delay, 30/sec) with:

xset r rate 200 30

and I have put this in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. This works fine if I run it in a console in the current X session, but if I log out, it changes. I get the repeat rate, but the repeat delay has gone back to KDE's setting, which seems to be about 500ms.

well, the problem is they keep adding layers of stuff that all muck with the same thing. the keyboard conf is a great example.

first you have the keymap daemon/service or whatever, which reads in something like /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz.

then you have X mucking with things once you fire that up.

finally (did i miss some?), you have very mysterious KDE settings coming in to muck up crap. i've seen keyboard options in multiple locations within KDE. one is in 'accessibility', another is in peripherals. i think i've seen more. got no idea what they modify.

liked it better when it was just the us.kmap file you had to worry about (or a single xmodmap file, but i like editing the kmap file myself).