X11: Map Shift-Win to be AltGr?

Question

How can one map the key combination Shift-Win to work as AltGr on Debian-based Linux distributions? XKB is very sparsely documented indeed!

Thanks.

Answer 1

The easiest way I know of is to run xev to find the keycode for your windows key (on my keyboard, it's 133, but it is likely to be different on yours), then find the keysym names for the windows key and Alt Gr (again, xev can help here, as can /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h, which is in x11proto-core-dev on Ubuntu). To use xev, just run it from the command line, then press the key you're interested in and look at the output.

I think Alt Gr is either Alt_R or ISO_Level3_Shift (the key labelled "Alt Gr" on my keyboard is mapped to the latter, but my left "Alt" key is mapped to Alt_L).

Then you can put something like the following in your shell initialisation file, e.g. ~/.bashrc (an alternative is .xmodmaprc):

xmodmap -e 'keycode 133=Super_L ISO_Level3_Shift'

See man xmodmap for more, and these pages:

http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/X11/xmodmap.html

http://madduck.net/docs/extending-xkb/

A different way to do it in Ubuntu may be via System->Preferences->Keyboard->Layouts->Options... Personally, I'm never sure what all those wordy descriptions mean ("Alt and meta are on alt keys"?).