You know how cursor behaves in practically any text field / text area / command line, where arrow keys move cursor by single character, but holding down Ctrl while pressing arrow keys moves cursor by whole word.

What kind of wizardry would one do in order to switch this around?
As in, make the move-by-word the default behaviour, but make holding down Ctrl move cursor by just a single character? Some keyboard input binding, where ⬅ is an alias for Ctrl+⬅ ? But no idea how to make the opposite of this. Make Ctrl+⬅ an keyboard shortcut for xdotool key Left or something?
Does a setting like this already exist?

Also not sure if /c/linux is the most appropriate community for this question. Feel free to suggest more appropriate one or even cross-post to there.
Thank you

  • GammaEnglish
    10•10 months ago

    I’m pretty sure both are possible in xkb. But you’ll have to learn how to get a custom xkb_keymap into your DE of choice. I only learned enough to do one mapping:

    xkb_keymap {
	xkb_keycodes  { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" };
	xkb_types     { include "complete" };
	xkb_compat    { include "complete" };
	xkb_symbols   {
		include "pc+us+inet(evdev)"
		key  {
			type= "TWO_LEVEL",
			symbols[Group1] = [  Multi_key,                Caps_Lock ],
			actions[Group1] = [ NoAction(), LockMods(modifiers=Lock) ]
		};
		key  {[ Escape ]};
	};
	xkb_geometry  { include "pc(pc105)" };
};

    This remaps Capslock to Escape, Escape to Compose, and Shift+Escape to Capslock. Not what you want, but hopefully this will give you a starting point to playing/breaking xkb.

    Another benefit of doing this with xkb: it’s now a separate codebase from X.org, and is used in every Wayland compositor I know of.