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kalkin/gnome-compose:lctrl.md

Created June 7, 2023 08:04
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Set Compose Key to Left Control in Gnome
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gnome-compose:lctrl.md

Enable Left Control Key as Compose Key on Gnome

In recent updates, Gnome Tweak Tool and the standard Gnome Keyboard Settings no longer provide the option to set the left control key as a Compose key. If you want to customize your keyboard configuration to use the left control key as a Compose key, follow these instructions.

Inspect Current Keyboard Settings

First, check your current keyboard settings by running the following command in your terminal:

gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.input-sources

Upon execution, you will see an output similar to the one below:

org.gnome.desktop.input-sources current uint32 0
...
org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options ['ctrl:nocaps']

For this tutorial, our main focus will be the last line of the output, specifically the xkb-options section.

Modify XKB Options

Next, we need to add 'compose:lctrl' to the xkb-options list. To do this, run the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['ctrl:nocaps', 'compose:lctrl']"

In this command, we're adding 'compose:lctrl' to the existing list of xkb-options, which effectively enables the left control key to serve as a Compose key.

And that's it! You've successfully customized your Gnome keyboard settings to enable the left control key as a Compose key.

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