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Setup of Logitech Navigator Keyboard

I bought a Logitech Navigator Keyboard for my laptop, since I hoped it would lower the preasure my wrists gets when writting +14 hours a day - which has been the case for the last few months.


The Navigator Deluxe keyboard comes with a lot of extra keys that I've setup to suit my needs. I'll try to describe how - mostly as a reminder so I can easily do it again later on.

Finding key codes

The first thing to do when mapping keys on a keyboard to commands is to figure out what key codes each key has, since this is needed when assigning a command to the key.


To figure out what keycode a given key has, start up the program xev (works for mouse events as well)


$ xev


Then click on the key you want to examine. This will dump a lot of information in the console

KeyPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
    root 0xae, subw 0x0, time 3795514, (129,86), root:(132,175),
    state 0x0, keycode 176 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:  ""

From this dump we can see that the pressed key's keycode is 176.

After having examined all keys' keycodes I've gotten the following lists of keycodes.

KeyCode overview

Binding keys to commands

The next step is to tell X what keys a click on e.g. the E-mail key should represent. The easiest thing is to use F-keys that aren't present on the keyboard e.g. F13

xmodmap -e "keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume"
xmodmap -e "keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume"
xmodmap -e "keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute"
xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = F13"

Using the gconf-edit tool the newly created keys can be assigned to commands, so key presses will execute these commands. In the above example I've created a F13 key, which I would like to have open an gnome-terminal.

In gconf-editor, click apps and then metacity. This will bring you to the settings for the Window Manager I'm currently using and which is the default for GNOME installations.

Under global_keybindings you set the run_command1 setting to F13 (or they key you want to bind) and then under keybindings_command set command₁ to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

When pressing the key the Window Manager will in the future open a new gnome-terminal.