Stand With Ukraine

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Remapping keys on kubuntu (Apple aluminum keyboard, Canadian Multilingual/French layout)

I like Apple keyboards, they are very comfortable to work with. But I prefer Linux to Mac, so I just attach my Apple keyboard to my Linux machine and try to make it work.

This time It worked almost out of the box on Kubuntu 21.04, but I had the following two keys swapped: 'ù' and '/'. First, I tried to remap them using xmodmap and xev, and it worked but that messed up my Yakuake shortcut and it continued to reset it after each reboot... I tried to figure out why, but in the process I found this post, which pointed me to this utility Key Mapper (just download and double-click the .deb to install it). From there it is easy to remap the keys (IFF you have sudo rights on your computer):

The only downside of this approach is that you have to have sudo rights to use the program. You could try installing it in an alternative location with
dpkg -x key-mapper*.deb dest/directory/of/your/choice
But, I think it requires root privileges to apply the mapping, which is a bummer. Not sure if this is easy to fix or if it is on the developer's radar.