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Making fn-keys work in Awesome WM |
2016-06-19 11:11:47 +0200 |
After switching to Awesome from Unity I didn't use fn-keys at all - I simply remapped their functionality to different shortcuts with mod4 key. But after sometime of using Awesome in a dual-boot system alongside with Windows made me crazy each time remembering which shortcut to use to change volume, or brightness. Here I want to show how to make some of fn-keys work in Awesome. |
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Basically there is nothing super hard in it. The only discovery for me was that the fn{:.key} does not throw any signal to X by itself. It works only in combination with some other key. To test that you can run xev (listens events from keyboard/mouse and prints them) in your terminal and press fn{:.key} several times.
Now let's try combination - fn{:.key}+F2{:.key} for instance - volume down for my DELL laptop. You'd see something like this in terminal:
{% highlight bash %} KeyPress event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0x800001, root 0xf5, subw 0x0, time 1407632, (543,-382), root:(543,520), state 0x0, keycode 122 (keysym 0x1008ff11, XF86AudioLowerVolume), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False
KeyRelease event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0x800001, root 0xf5, subw 0x0, time 1407739, (543,-382), root:(543,520), state 0x0, keycode 122 (keysym 0x1008ff11, XF86AudioLowerVolume), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False {% endhighlight bash %}
The interesting part here is keycode 122 (keysym 0x1008ff11, XF86AudioLowerVolume). To refer to this combination in rc.lua we need keycode with hash - #122. So for volumes fn keys combination the key mapping would be like this:
{% highlight lua %} awful.key({ }, "#122", function () awful.util.spawn("amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%-") end), awful.key({ }, "#123", function () awful.util.spawn("amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%+") end), {% endhighlight lua %}
And for brightness level:
{% highlight lua %} awful.key({ }, "#232", function () awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -dec 10") end), awful.key({ }, "#233", function () awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -inc 10") end), {% endhighlight lua %}
Another way to get keycodes of key combinations is to list them using following command: xmodmap -pke and then grep them, for example: xmodmap -pke | grep Brightness.