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by j_m_b 680 days ago
I've been curious about PopOS for awhile and so glad to see the development of their own desktop environment.

>And I'm the type who always remaps his Caps Lock key to Escape, but there's no place to do that yet, and the Gnome-Tweaks app won't work, either. Some of this is probably the distribution itself, some of it is

If System76 devs are reading this, please prioritize key remapping! I have years of macOS shortcuts burned into my cerebral cortex, it's a no-go for me to try and learn Linux ones, especially considering I use a Mac daily for work. Would be nice if this could even be a separate theme, so I could just download a file with macOS key bindings and edit it. A 1-1 GUI -> file config would be icing!

2 comments

There's a GUI on KDE for that. I believe GNOME also has one.

It's not universal though. If I drop down to the TTY, the key mappings don't work (expectedly, but disappointing nonetheless). Some apps also don't respect that key mapping.

macOS is much more integrated and everything seems to obey whatever you config in the OS.

Gnome-tweaks + customization of terminal shortcuts is what I currently use on Ubuntu for when I need to run a Linux desktop. If key bindings could be read from a file, it would be a nice leap forward. A GUI could be built up on top of that. You could just have your key bindings in ~/.cosmicrc or ~/config/cosmic/keybindings.
KDE's configuration are in config files[0], with a GUI built on top. I'm not sure how it could be any different.

The problem is to make applications (and TTYs!) that don't know about those config files and implement their own text input systems or use frameworks or SDKs that bypass the DE's settings. I can't see how Cosmic would fix that.

I hope I'm wrong and the Linux desktop experience is better off for it, but I'm skeptical.

[0] https://userbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/Configura...

+1, this is crucial