Description: The personal website of me, Alex Baines, cataloguing my programming projects like small C++ games. Check out my GitHub page or contact me here.
With all the talk of new display managers like Mir and Wayland rising, this is perhaps an outdated topic to discuss, but with overall documentation about X11 and Xkb keyboard handling being pretty sparse, I thought I’d note my findings down anyway.
Getting a layout independent ID for a key - the same concept as a scancode - is especially useful for games where you want to bind keys for specific finger positions like WASD without worrying if the player is using an AZERTY keyboard, or an alternate layout like dvorak or colemak.
Doing this on Linux and X11 turns out to actually be pretty easy, although not well documented.