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Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

XFCE Keyboard Mapping: Random Jots

The multimedia keyboard on this box doesn’t work, which likely has something to do with the fact that I’m running separate X sessions on two monitors. I described what does work on my laptop there.

Here are some random & incomplete notes, with no good outcome…

Key and keyboard definitions are in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes with:

  • xfree86 mapping the symbolic name (as in <I1E>) to key number 158
  • inet mapping from XF86AudioRaiseVolume to symbolic name

The Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 V1.0 (don’t you love how they name things?) seems to be a subset of the microsoftprousb keyboard definition.

Manually assigning a key works like this:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts \
  -p /commands/custom/XF85AudioRaiseVolume \
  -t string
  -n
  --set="amixer -c 0 sset Master 10%+"

Use xev to find key numbers, which turn out to be more or less common values (contrary to what I initially thought)…

  • Back = 234 I6A
  • Forward = 233 I69
  • Vol down = 174 I2E
  • Mute = 160 I20
  • Vol up = 176 I30
  • Play/Pause = 162 I22
  • Home = 178 I32 XFree86HomePage
  • Search = 299 I65 XFree86Search
  • Email = 236 I6C XFree86Mail
  • Calculator = 161 I21 XFree86Calculator

The first two keys are defined in nav_common and the rest are in media_common, with the combination in, of course, media_nav_common.

But none of this actually works.