Keyboard firmware mapping

MNT Reform
1

I’ve just successfully remaped my reform keyboard for the first time. It’s a great relief to finally have ctrl next to the A key where it belongs! However, I noticed a strange quirk I can’t understand.

It seems that no matter what keycode I put in the key next to left shift, it sends a forward-delete keycode (119). Oddly in the default firmware it’s mapped to HID_KEYBOARD_SC_NON_US_BACKSLASH_AND_PIPE rather than delete.

Here’s the matrix in my version: *temp*

The indicated key can be bound to any value, but it always produces a forward-delete keycode. xev shows this:

KeyPress event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,
root 0xd0, subw 0x0, time 3252890, (515,416), root:(515,416),
state 0x0, keycode 119 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) “”
XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) “”
XFilterEvent returns: False

Any idea what’s going on here?

1 Like
2

Yes, you simply have to comment out the KBD_VARIANT_QWERTY_US define near the top of Keyboard.c for this key not to be overwritten later in the code.

3

I see, thanks for pointing that out. So you’re saying it’s intentional?

It looks like the only purpose of that whole define is to override whatever value was in the original matrix array, but its naming doesn’t reflect that, since QWERTY_US layouts don’t have a delete key in that position. I feel like that should probably be removed? Or at least renamed to make its purpose clearer, though it’s difficult for me to determine what the purpose is.

I can submit a patch to fix this if you like.

1 Like
4

I would like to make some changes to the keyboard layout, and the trackball behavior as well, but I’m completely new to linux with my reform…I have no idea how or where to start.

The things I want to change so far are the up cursor key getting swapped with the right shift key (having the shift key next to the question mark key is sinful for touch typists)

And I want to be able to reverse the scrolling direction on the trackball…I thought maybe the “natural scrolling” option in the settings might be the direction inverting option, but it seems not…and I can’t seem to figure out what natural scrolling option is for…