I noted yesterday that I had found a bit to remap keys allowing for one-handed use of a keyboard. Today I found some tidbits that make it a little better.

I had two problems with the mirrorboard keyboard mapping I found yesterday. The first was that my keyboard lost some mappings, like for the arrow keys. Another was that I thought using the caps-lock was a little less than intuitive, and found that losing caps-lock could hamper my efforts from time-to-time.

I've not tinkered too much with keyboard mappings, but today I was forced to search for a fix to a munge that I kept encountering. Part of what I do involves working in a virtual machine, and sometimes my keyboard would get mangled when I switched between the VM and applications running on the host. I wondered what setting was wrong, so a quick Google search brought me to the setxkbmap command to restore it to its default state. Sweet. Before I found that I'd have to logout to have the OS reset the mapping for me.

In one of the articles related to setxkbmap, there was a note about xkbcomp -xkb $DISPLAY as the trick to have the system dump the current key mapping. This led me to a trifecta of things I'd need to do to get the mapping correct.

First I dumped the default. Then I applied the mirrorboard mapping and dumped it again. Then I did a side-by-side-by-side comparison to see what was different or missing, adding the mirrored mappings to the dump of the default. I also found a little bit about mapping the Windows key, so I decided to use that instead of caps-lock since there are no mappings tied to it that I could find anyway.

Then I found one last mapping that I needed to remove a bunch of errors that exist from missing keys; a "do nothing" mapping.

So now my laptop, running Ubuntu, has a magic key combination with the Windows key that flips the alpha and a few other keys. Hold down the Windows key, and q turns into p, w into o, s into l, c into m, and so on. Without the Windows key, everything is as it was. Additionally, even with the Windows key, other keys do what the do normally!

Now I've just got to get used to typing with one hand. I think I'll try to find a set of little decal letters so I can see what the alternate letter is without scanning across the keyboard.

At least until I get used to it.