Remapping Keys "Up to Eleven"

Remapping keys on your linux is a "normal" thing to do amongst hardcore vim or emacs users.

The most standard hack is to remap CapsLock to Escape or to Ctrl.

And with emacs' key-chord and key-seq plugins, you can have really fancy combos to do the most obvious save-buffer, m-x, switch-to-buffer...

But I just discovered (via this reddit thread) that there's this "xcape" thing that allows you to bind keys to different keycodes depending on whether a key is pressed and released on its own or it's pressed as a modifier key along with other keys.

Here's how to "Remap left and right shift, when pressed alone, to left and right parens on keyup": xcape -t 250 -e "Shift\_L=parenleft;Shift\_R=parenright" &


That's super cool. And the readme of the project has some hardcore hacks for even more crazy conditional remappings.

As a side note, but kinda related, here's a great recent article about all kinds of glue (and duct tape) for X windows. And here's another awesome post about wizardy linux usages. The guy uses dmenu as an interface to a barebones plumber and gave me an idea to improve on my home made plumber (be smart and let you trim down witn dmenu when there are multiple options)