Keyboard tweaks to use Xorg on an IBook laptop

Simple article for posterity or future-me. I will share here my tweaks to make the IBook G4 laptop (apple keyboard) suitable for OpenBSD , this should work for Linux too as long as you run X.

Command should be alt+gr

I really need the alt+gr key which is not there on the keyboard, I solved this by using this line in my ~/.xsession.

xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = ISO_Level3_Shift"

i3 and mod4

As the touchpad is incredibely bad by nowadays standards (and it only has 1 button and no scrolling feature!), I am using a window manager that could be entirely keyboard driven, while I’m not familiar with tiling window manager, i3 was easy to understand and light enough. Long time readers may remember I am familiar with stumpwm but it’s not really a dynamic tiling window manager, I can only tolerate i3 using the tabs mode.

But an issue arise, there are no “super” key on the keyboard, and using “alt” would collide with way too many programs. One solution is to use “caps lock” as a “super” key.

I added this in my ~/.xsession file:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

with ~/.Xmodmap having the following instructions:

clear Lock 
keycode 66 = Hyper_L
add mod4 = Hyper_L
clear Lock

This will disable to “toggling” effect of caps lock, and will turn it into a “Super” key that will be refered as mod4 for i3.