XKeyCaps

So, in full-tilt pique at the fact that the crummy computers I had to use still didn't have this basic utility that my 128k Macintosh had in 1984, I hacked it together, taught it about the four or five keyboards I had access to, and about the half dozen more I was able to find descriptions of in manuals, and released the result. Since then, I've been sent new keyboard descriptions with great regularity, so that it now knows about (at final count) 208 different configurations! (Isn't it sick that so many different configurations even exist?)

If our hearts are pure, we can stamp out xmodmap in our lifetime.

Stick a fork in it. It's done:

As you may have noticed by the fact that there hasn't been a new release of xkeycaps since 1999, development on this program has stopped. That's it, the last version. Use it in good health.

I'm no longer maintaining this program for several reasons:

• At this point, it's not really necessary to add more keyboard models: it knows about so many different keyboard types already that one of them is bound to be close enough to whatever keyboard you have to let you do what you want to do.

• It uses a completely obsolete toolkit (the Athena widget set) and porting it to a more modern toolkit would basically mean rewriting it from scratch.

• Integrating each patch people send in takes a very long time, since people usually send patches that are broken and/or wastefully implemented. Checking, cleaning, and integrating them takes a long time, and is no fun whatsoever.

• The code is really not very good (give me a break, it was my first major from-scratch X program!)

• The GNOME 2.8+ Keyboard Preferences now do the most useful parts of what xkeycaps did. It does not allow remapping of arbitrary keys, but people rarely wanted that anyway. Instead, the "Layout Options" page in the Keyboard Preferences dialog lets you select from a set of the most common wishes, such as, "Make CapsLock an additional Control", "Right Control Key works as Right Alt", and "Menu is Compose".

What follows is a list of the keyboard types that xkeycaps knows about (this is the output of ``xkeycaps -help''.) If you're using a keyboard not on this list, pick one that looks similar, and start pressing keys on your (real) keyboard. If the right keys light up on the screen, then you've found a keyboard model that is close enough for you to use.