Arch Linux

bertulli

Member

Registered: 2021-11-25

Posts: 48

How to switch Fn and Ctrl_L keys on a Lenovo T61?

Hi all!

Sorry if the question is noob-ish (I was tempted to post it in Newbie's corner) and/or if it has already been asked.
I have a Lenovo T61, happily running Arch. However, the Fn and Ctrl_L are swapped wrt other laptops. This is cumbersome when using a lot Ctrl (see Emacs). New Lenovo laptops are aware of this and provide a BIOS setting to swap them, however I don't have such an option. So I'm forced to use software tweaks.
I tried looking at the Wiki, but I'm unsure of what to do (acting on scancodes vs keycodes, for instance). Can you please help me? For now, I can tell you:

Running

xev | awk -F'[ )]+' '/^KeyPress/ { a[NR+2] } NR in a { printf "%-3s %s\n", $5, $8 }'

gave me

151 XF86WakeUp // (which actually is the Fn key)
37  Control_L

While going to a TTY and playing a bit with `showkeys -s`

0xe0 0x63 // => Fn press
0xe0 0xe3 // => Fn release
0x1d // => Ctrl_L press
0x9d // => Ctrl_L release

What should I do now to swap them?
Thanks!

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