Keyboard shortcuts ideas and recommendations

Support Device Recommendation
1

Hi everybody,

I’m considering a Chromebook as my next Linux daily driver, but I’m quite worried about the keyboard and specifically my lifelong-usual shortcuts. Comparing to the regular laptops, a bunch of keys is simply missing on many Chromebooks (Super, Fn, CapsLock), so I would appreciate some opinions and examples on how chrultrabook community solves what seems to be a problem to me.

I anticipate having to re-learn the following shortcuts (all containing the missing keys), so could you share what you personally use for:

  1. Compose key (I use CapsLock);

  2. screen locking (I use Super+L);

  3. quick search, e.g. to start an application or open a specific settings page (just Super);

  4. showing of the dev tools in the browsers (F12);

  5. navigating through text with Home/PgUp/PgDn/End (on my laptops, it’s Fn + arrows);

  6. keyboard layout/language change (I use Super+Space);

  7. taking screenshots: active window, screen region, etc. (on my current laptops, this involves both Fn and PrtSc plus some modifier keys).

Would also appreciate if you’d specify your graphical environment. I mostly use KDE, sometimes XFce.

I understand that everyone’s different and it’s possible to configure ad-hoc combinations for all this and learn them, but maybe some best practices have formed in the community, or someone shares really nice ideas.

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I created GitHub - WeirdTreeThing/cros-keyboard-map: Utility to generate keyd configurations for use on Chromebooks to get most of the functionality that I feel is important and wanted by most users. However, it is opinionated. You can run the script to generate a keyd config and then manually modify it to fit your needs.

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Thanks for sharing! This tool might be of good use when I have better understanding what my shortcut needs might be with the chrultrabook.

If not too much hassle, could you share the literal combinations that you’ve set up for yourself, for the cases that I’ve listed?

4

I just use the default config from my script. Nothing more, nothing less.

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5

I used this script on Linux mint and it worked very well. I just had to add “leftmeta = capslock“ under [alt] section and the capslock started to work after a restart of keyd - sudo systemctl restart keyd.service

[alt]
backspace = delete
brightnessdown = kbdillumdown
brightnessup = kbdillumup
f6 = kbdillumdown
f7 = kbdillumup
leftmeta = capslock #add this to CAPSLOCK work in Linux Mint

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Made these changes recently after 2-3 years:

[main]
rightalt = overload(media, compose)

[alt]
space = compose

[media]
p = playpause
s = stop
  1. I had the realization that my right-Alt was gathering dust and can be used as a function key
  2. Moving right-click functionality (compose) away from the trackpad and to keyboard is vim-esque
  3. I can probably figure out more uses cases for right-Alt over time.