The Best Without X

Caps_Lock: Why have a “Caps Lock” key near the “a” key? When caps lock was useful to write silly BASIC programs they put it far from alphabetic keys; now that it is not so useful, they turned it to a trap for your little finger. Just get rid of it and turn it into a Control key.

alt-CapsLock will still yield CapsLock
keycode 58 = Control
control keycode 58 = Control

Control: The Control key on the bottom-left corner is a duplicate of the one we put by the “a”. You can turn it into Last_Console and thus have a fast editor/compiler context switch. Moreover, this makes your wrist useful in typing. Last_Console switches to the previous console you visited, and is one of the several exotic capabilities of the Linux keyboard.

keycode 29 = Last_Console

The Numeric Keypad Unless you're used to desktop calculators, the numeric keypad is too far in the right to be useful in typing digits, and can be turned to a console-switch scratchpad: hitting Alt-F8 takes a whole hand, and Alt-F1 isn't easy, either, at least on keyboards with the function keys at the top. Similarly, X-Windows users can configure the keypad as a map to their virtual desktop, provided that the Num_Lock key is left alone: xmodmap can't differentiate a non-Num_Locked keypad from the arrow keys. The “0” key then is suitable to be another Last_Console, useful if you didn't get rid of Caps_Lock.

keycode  29 = Last_Console # KP_0
keycode  79 = Console_1    # KP_1
keycode  80 = Console_2    # KP_2
keycode  81 = Console_3    # KP_3
keycode  75 = Console_4    # KP_4
keycode  76 = Console_5    # KP_5
keycode  77 = Console_6    # KP_6
keycode  71 = Console_7    # KP_7
keycode  72 = Console_8    # KP_8
keycode  73 = Console_9    # KP_9
keycode  98 = Console_10   # KP_Divide
keycode  55 = Console_11   # KP_Multiply
keycode  96 = Console_12   # KP_Enter
keycode  78 = Console_13   # KP_Add
keycode  74 = Console_14   # KP_Subtract

Home and End It can be useful to configure Home as Control -a and End as Control-e. This works with bash, tcsh and Emacs, without any other fiddling.

keycode 102 = Control_a
keycode 107 = Control_e

Escape: If you are used to Sparc2s, old PCs, or the old faithful Apple II you'll enjoy putting the Esc key near the “1”. This change forces you to reposition the backtick/tilde pair as well. The exact change made here may not work on your keyboard, you'd better check your keycodes with showkeys.

keycode  41 = Escape  # Escape
alt     keycode   1 = Meta_Escape
# recycle grave/asciitilde near the Enter key
keycode  43 = grave   # asciitilde
control keycode  41 = nul
alt     keycode  41 = Meta_grave

Backslash: The backslash/bar pair should be near “Z”, where the default keyboard configuration puts a duplicate of less/greater.

keycode  86 = backslash        bar
control keycode  43 = Control_backslash
alt     keycode  43 = Meta_backslash

gpm-root: This tool can spawn a new getty on the lowest-numbered free console in your system: just press control-mouse to wake the program, then press the mouse button again on the correct menu entry, and you will soon be presented with a newly-created login: prompt—it's that easy. When you log out from that console, everything is cleaned up automatically. This way of spawning consoles has the advantage that the /etc/utmp file is kept up to date, and thus the who command tells you the truth.

open: The tiny open utility spawns a new console and executes a program in it. You can use loadkeys to create a hot key which invokes open. Thus a single keypress (or meta-key) can log you in. This approach doesn't update the utmp database and works only when the hotkey is fed to a shell prompt.

spawn_console: The daemon spawn_console is part of the kbd package. It creates a console in response to a signal sent by the kernel in response to a Spawn_Console keysym. This approach works even if there isn't a shell to get your key, and doesn't update the utmp database.