[xmonad] My hack to allow disabling of numlock without messing with my xmonad mod key

Brandon Allbery allbery.b at gmail.com
Wed Mar 20 14:26:54 CET 2013


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Thomas Løcke <thomas.granvej6 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I would still very much prefer if this could've been fixed in xmonad.hs,
> or if xmonad would just let me do my xmodmap'ing without destroying my mod
> key, but as that does not seem to be possible, I'll settle for second best.
>

Again, you cannot fix this reliably with xmodmap, you must use Xkb. Your
solution will work as long as the interaction *in the X server* between Xkb
and xmodmap is not disturbed (luckily for you, even the xorg devs are
terrified of disturbing it...).

And again, this is not really an xmonad issue. You are fighting against the
essential incompatibility between Xkb keymaps and xmodmap with respect to
any modifier whose behavior is hardcoded into an Xkb keymap, a problem
which has been known for years (the XFree86/xorg folks have tried to
deprecate xmodmap many times since Xkb was added because of this
incompatibility, but users won't use complex-looking Xkb mechanisms to e.g.
swap caps lock and control keys).

This *cannot* be fixed in xmonad; the problem is happening in the guts of
the keyboard driver in the X server, and by the time xmonad gets involved
it's far too late to deal with it.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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