Binding "media keys" to actions, tutorial
Dances With Crows
"Scott Clawson" <sc...@release1.com> wrote, in an E-mail message that
should've been posted to Usenet:
> I found your xbindkeys post (attached below) recently and was hoping
> if you could quickly point me in the right direction for what I'm
> trying to do. I am trying to make Mozilla acknowledge my Internet
> keyboard's forward/back keys. My intent is to have these keys send
> Alt-Right or Alt-Left keystrokes, respectively, which virtually all
> browsers (including Mozilla) understand for page forward/back,
> respectively. I've been pulling my hair out as to how I can map a key
> to a combination such as those above -- After spending several hours
> searching for a solution, I've still found nothing. How can I achieve
> my goal, if even possible?
The xbindkeys post that Scott refers to is
slrnakmch8.1rm....@samantha.crow202.dyndns.org , use
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search to find it.
The solution is to use xbindkeys and xmacroplay in combination. Get
xbindkeys from http://hocwp.free.fr/xbindkeys/xbindkeys.html , get
xmacroplay from http://xmacro.sourceforge.net/ . Build them and install
them (should be very easy.) Then:
In an xterm or konsole, execute "xbindkeys -k". Then press the media
key you'd like to bind to a key combination. You will see something
like this:
"NoCommand"
m:0x10 + c:176
Mod2 + NoSymbol
Paste the middle line into your ~/.xbindkeysrc file along with an
xmacroplay invocation like so:
"xmacroplay :0 < ~/.key1"
m:0x10 + c:176
Then edit ~/.key1 so it contains the following:
KeyStrPress Alt_L
KeyStrPress Left
KeyStrRelease Left
KeyStrRelease Alt_L
...Wow, you've just bound this media key such that it executes Alt+Left!
Groovy. Do similar things for any other media keys you wish to bind to
key combinations, making sure to have a separate .key file (or
something) for each media key you wish to bind. It'd be more elegant to
have some sort of scripty-thing that invoked xmacroplay, but I'm not
going to write one just yet.
Yes, we could use a friendly KDE/GNOME frontend to this sort of thing.
I know about xbindkeys_config , but it doesn't take xmacroplay into
account. HTH,
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL