Hello. I, like many others I suspect, have these completely annoying (they take valuable space) "web keys" on my keyboard. Instead of them just being there as useless thingies, I was thinking of perhaps putting them into use, for stuff like starting emacs or something. Is this at all possible? Is the protocol perhaps different from manufacturer to manufacturer? While this isn''t relly important, it might be fun to set up if it''s possible. Does anyone have any information on this?

They probably generate keycodes like any other key. If you use something like xev to find out what the keycodes are, you can assign keysyms to them with xmodmap. Just create a file with lines like:

keycode 0x25 = Control_L

only with whatever the special keys'' keycodes are instead of 0x25 and whatever keysyms you decide are useful instead of Control_L. "Execute", "Menu", "Find", "Help" are good ones that usually aren''t used on a PC keyboard. There''s a list in keysymdef.h in your X11 include files directory; jsut chop off the "XK_" for the keysym name xmodmap will use.

After that it''s just a matter of doing whatever your window manager/desktop/apps want to map those keys to something useful (e.g., I have the "context menu" key mapped to X11''s Menu keysym, and fvwm set up to display the root menu when Menu is pressed).

Make your life easy and grab Lineak (aka Linux support for Easy Access and Internet Keyboards) http://lineak.sf.net

c ya,
Tobias

you could also use xbindkeys

500x1