Macbook DE Custom Layouts
I spent some time on learning how to build your own keymap for your own hardware. First I noticed, that there are two levels you have to configure:
- Console Level: If you do not use your x environement all the time, you need to set up a console keymap, so that you can use special signs with your passwords, and maybe do coding stuff and such tings lowlevel. There are two ways of getting a working keymap, first is to steal one out of ubuntu, which makes your keyboard work like in MacOS or you build your own. I wanted a standard keylayout in german for my mac, so that I can code as I’m used to it.
- Xorg-Level: Xorg decided not to use this all time screwed console-level keymanagement, but implemented its own. In my debian version, I had a really fancy, nearly complete layout for all the standard keys. But all special keys, like pipe, at, euro, and all the brackets and bracers I luv to use for my hacking, were not working and I had to add em. The tool I used is xmodmap, which comes with the xorg-server naturally.
After all this searching and reading alot of manpages, I discovered, its not that hard to build all this, but there is alot of confusing stuff, so I added alot of comments to my config files so that others, maybe like you can learn from them. You can download them at the end of this post. Have a lot of fun…
- xmodmap – xmodmap config file
- mac-de-tron-custom-keymap.kmap – linux keymap file
