Re: How bind "Super" key *all by itself* to a function?

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
> !WORKS!
>
> So where does one get initiated into the school of black art?
> ie how do I figure out what those incantations mean?

Oh, I’ll tell you where. Former Soviet Union, or Bulgaria, or Greece,
or any other country with a non-Latin alphabet. Basically, until you
figure out at least how to have two layouts loaded and switch them
with a single keystroke, your computer pretty much “just does not
work”. Well, it kinda works, you just can’t type any text.

[These days, there is also ibus, which gives an illusion of easy
configuration. Avoid.]

Seriously, though, there’s Ivan Pascal’s guide[1], there’s Doug
Palmer’s Unreliable Guide to XKB Configuration[2], Michał Kosmulski’s
guide[3], and not much more. And also abstracting from existing
configuration.

[1]: http://pascal.tsu.ru/en/xkb/setup.html
[2]: http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/html/index.html
[3]: http://michal.kosmulski.org/computing/articles/custom-keyboard-layouts-xkb.html

> One of my problems is how to debug:
> If some small thing goes wrong and it does not work... where to start looking?

If some small thing goes wrong, you’re screwed :-> You boot X, are
greeted by a cryptic error message; if lucky, the base configuration
still works and you get to fix things without having to use a
different input system (e.g. switching to tty1).

I’ve got my share of such b0rks and in many cases it was something
small like a missing semicolon or a mistyped something. The kind of
mistakes you can look for and not see for hours. And, to add insult to
injury, XKB caches its compiled data, so when you fix the cause of the
problem and just re-login, it still does not work until you drop the
cache. [Hint: sudo rm /var/lib/xkb/*.xkm and then re-login.]