Xmodmap on Fedora

Published on 17 September 2014.

This text was in my notes for quite a while before I published it on my website.

I have the following in my ~/.Xmodmap:

! setup mode switch on Alt_GR
keysym Alt_R = Mode_switch

! remap Alt_GR + [ ' ; to å ä ö
keycode 34 = bracketleft braceleft aring Aring aring Aring
keycode 48 = apostrophe quotedbl adiaeresis Adiaeresis adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode 47 = semicolon colon odiaeresis Odiaeresis odiaeresis Odiaeresis

I use it to be able to type the Swedish characters on a US keyboard. For most of my work, I prefer the US keyboard layout, but I sometimes have to type Swedish characters. With this setting, I can press for example “Alt_GR + [” to get an “å”.

Problem with Alt + Shift order

When pressing “Alt_GR + Shift_L + [” I get an “Å” (as expected).

When pressing “Shift_L + Alt_GR + [” I get an “{” (but expected an “Å”).

Checking the output from xev using xev | grep KeyPress\\\|keysym I got the following:

Pressing “Alt_GR + Shift_L + [”:

KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x10, keycode 108 (keysym 0xff7e, Mode_switch), same_screen YES,
KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x2010, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x2011, keycode 34 (keysym 0xc5, Aring), same_screen YES,

Pressing “Shift_L + Alt_GR + [”:

KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x10, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x11, keycode 108 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,    <-- NoSymbol
KeyPress event, serial 30, synthetic NO, window 0x4600001,
	state 0x11, keycode 34 (keysym 0x7b, braceleft), same_screen YES,

On my Debian system, the output from xev looks the same no matter in which order I press Shift_L and Alt_GR, but for some reason this does not work on my Fedora 14 system. Any ideas what might be wrong? Why do I get the NoSymbol on Fedora? (Fedora 20 has the same problem.)

I have used the same keyboard on both systems, so I don’t believe this problem is hardware related.

Suspend after resume

On my Fedora 14 system, I had the following in /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/run-xmodmap.sh:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "post" ] ; then
	typeset -x DISPLAY=:0.0
	sleep 1
	su -c "/usr/bin/xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap" rick
fi

Without it, I had to type xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap manually each time after resuming my laptop from sleep. In Fedora 20 this seems to be no longer required.