How to remap keys on a user level both with and without X

I want to remap Capslock and I want this remap to work on both my machine with an X server and on machine without X. I also want this remap to be applied on a user level, not on a global level. This answer has a remap solution which works both with and without X. But the remap works globally and requires root permissions. Is it possible to remap a key locally and have it working with and without X?

Solution 1:

Well bummers! I've done some research and discovered that changing the keymap to remap CAPSLOCK (for example) REQUIRES root access. I'm sorry.

In the spirit of information, I'll retain what I had been working on here:

You can set up user-only keyboard configurations by putting options in ~/.keyboard, these will override the system-wide defaults set in /etc/default/keyboard

• NOTE: to get setupcon to read your ~/.keyboard, you MUST create ~/.console-setup, an empty file will suffice. The logic in setupcon does not check for ~/.keyboard, it looks for ~/.console-setup and then reads both files. Tsk Tsk

You didn't specify what you'd like CAPSLOCK to be mapped to, so I'll give several examples.

You can use the /etc/default/keyboard file as a template if you wish, something like one of these entries in ~/.keyboard would probably work well for you:

(remember you really only need settings which override the system defaults in /etc/default/keyboard)

XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"     # CAPSLOCK => CTRL

XKBOPTIONS="caps:escape"     # CAPSLOCK => ESC

XKBOPTIONS="compose:caps"    # CAPSLOCK => Compose (my favorite!)

There are (many!) more options available, have a look at the man page for setupcon (1) and the contents of the file: /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst on your system.k