I’m running on a Dell 13 7310 which like all Chromebooks does not have a Delete key. AFAICT there’s no way to use the keyboard remapping feature in Settings with a non-existent key. How can I use a combination like Super+Backspace to trigger a Delete? Googled solutions are all for X11 rather than Wayland.
What keyboard layout do you have in the settings? Do you see any related to Chromebooks? Have you tried Right Alt + Backspace instead?
I know xkb comes with a Chromebook keyboard layout that maps Right Alt + Backspace to Delete, but I’m not sure if GNOME shows/supports it by default.
Keyboard layout is English US. There is no Chromebook keyboard in the list. There’s a “Add” button which is greyed out. There’s no “Authenticate” option to become root like there is in the Users section so I guess that’s not usable.
I found the xkb Chromebook layout you mentioned here. It’s installed by replacing the existing /usr/share/X11/xkb folder. I’m a bit nervous about hosing my system doing this but I’ll keep my rescue USB stick handy.
[Edit} The Chromebook layout I downloaded seems eliminated all the usual Gnome shortcuts. I’ll keep working on figuring out how to modify the existing layout.
Err, that’s not what I meant, and I don’t think those were designed for GNOME… First off, restore your keymap settings via dnf reinstall xkeyboard-config.
Now, I spent a couple hours trying this, and this is the best I can do:
Try editing /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us, and right after the line:
name[Group1]= "English (US)";
add these lines:
include "level3(ralt_switch)"
key <BKSP> { [ BackSpace, BackSpace, Delete ] };
Then sign back in and out, and Right Alt+Backspace will be your delete key. I believe you can switch to Super (which is the Search key on the Chromebook, right?) by chainging level3(ralt_switch) to level3(win_switch), but that might mess with the normal behavior of the Super key.
1 Like
I think you’re right about the keyboard file I downloaded: it’s intended to be used with Galliumos, a Chromebook specific distro based on Ubuntu so Unity. I had a backup of the xkb folder so no problem.
Your solution works perfectly! This a total rabbit hole that I wasn’t looking forward to going down. Yes, the Chromebook Search key is mapped to Super so better to not mess with that.
Awesome forum support here.
1 Like