Keyboard tweaks to use Xorg on an IBook laptop

Author: Solène

Date: 09 November 2020

Tags: openbsd

NILSimple article for posterity or future-me. I will share here my tweaks

to make the IBook G4 laptop (apple keyboard) suitable for OpenBSD ,

this should work for Linux too as long as you run X.

Command should be alt+gr

I really need the alt+gr key which is not there on the keyboard, I

solved this by using this line in my `~/.xsession`.

xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = ISO_Level3_Shift"

i3 and mod4

As the touchpad is incredibely bad by nowadays standards (and it only

has 1 button and no scrolling feature!), I am using a window manager

that could be entirely keyboard driven, while I'm not familiar with

tiling window manager, i3 was easy to understand and light

enough. Long time readers may remember I am familiar with stumpwm but

it's not really a dynamic tiling window manager, I can only tolerate

i3 using the tabs mode.

But an issue arise, there are no "super" key on the keyboard, and

using "alt" would collide with way too many programs. One solution is

to use "caps lock" as a "super" key.

I added this in my `~/.xsession` file:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

with `~/.Xmodmap` having the following instructions:

clear Lock

keycode 66 = Hyper_L

add mod4 = Hyper_L

clear Lock

This will disable to "toggling" effect of caps lock, and will turn it

into a "Super" key that will be refered as mod4 for i3.