short story: there is no “Menu” key on the t440 keyboard, (it does the same as clicking r-mouse-button, trackpad buttons can be cumbersome)
hostnamectl; # tested on Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-14-amd64 Architecture: x86-64 xev; # little tool that gives keycode for key pressed # keycode of right-shift: (seldom/never used) keycode 62 KeyRelease event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x4200001, root 0xe0, subw 0x0, time 14233432, (-29,144), root:(673,513), state 0x11, keycode 62 (keysym 0xffe2, Shift_R), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False # what keycode does the (r-mouse-button-klick-key) xmodmap -pk|grep Menu 135 0xff67 (Menu) 0x0000 (NoSymbol) 0xff67 (Menu) # try to swap the keys xmodmap -e "keycode 62 = Menu"
it is a per-user setting, so it needs to set as the uesr running the desktop gui (xserver)
to apply it system wide one can put it in last line of bash.bashrc
there seems to be some strange bug or feature that makes a sleep 4 delay (delays & timeouts are almost always bad workaround) necessary to apply the keyboard setting
su - root;
echo "sleep 4 && \$(xmodmap -e \"keycode 62 = Menu\") &" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
long story:
anyone who tried to use keyboard on a different computer in a different language quickly will have made the experience: it’s almost impossible.
except for space and enter, the keyboards are not very similar in layout and keymapping and using a laptop with foreign language keyboard layout is almost impossible without stickers to tape over the keys.
there are actually some keyboard standards:
- 5 ISO/IEC 9995-4 (specifies the num block)
- 6 ISO/IEC 9995-5 (cursor keys)
- 7 ISO/IEC 9995-7 (“code points”)
- 8 ISO/IEC 9995-8 (again numblock)
- 9 ISO/IEC 9995-9 (2016 defines multi-lingual, multiscript keyboard layouts)
- 10 ISO/IEC 9995-10 (specifies several symbols to enable the unique identification of characters on keytops which otherwise can easily be misidentified (as em vs. en dashes))
- 11 ISO/IEC 9995-11:2015 is related to the “functionality of dead keys and repertoires of characters entered by dead keys”
spacebar, enter button, all a given… but anything else does not seem to be very standardized like the position of buttons.
every vendor seems to make their own keyboard layout, even different from models to model.
guess lenovo thought the r-click-mouse-button key is not used a lot, so there is NONE on t440 keyboard, so above is the fix 🙂
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