I have now bought three keyboards off fleabay, all of which are no good. I bought a Lenovo wired one cheap, thinking the function keys (play pause volume prtscr brightness mute etc) would work, but none of them do (even if i use FN).
I am at a loss now. Just thought I’d post a thread in case anyone knows of a nice, slim as poss (think Mac style keyboard, physically i mean), fedora friendly keyboard where the media and function keys do their jobs?
Use Gnome-Tweaks to set alternative layouts.
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Can’t work out how to do that. I have played with that for hours. I can use it to swap alt/win and others, but not function keys
Keyboards pretty much work, and if you are old enough to remember those Keyboards with full multimedia keys and Internet Email keys, I had one of those and reprogrammed the keys.
It does take some fiddling, but there are tools to get all the keys doing what you want. If I was not on a Laptop, and in a Public place/Library most of the days, i would totally have one with shortcuts for my apps and neovim 
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Thanks HC. What ‘tools’ do you use?
Well right now you can use Gnome Tweaks, and also the potentially overly complicated :
granted there are tools for mapping keyboards, and the use of config files. Here is the catch, some of these tools are old, so they might not work on Wayland specific desktop environments.
xmodmap
I’ll list other here too.
One way to get around this is to map the keys using custom shortcuts.
- Here I choose Set Shortcut
- Here I choose the Keys i want to use for said function.
This is a more contrived way, but can provide a solution to the issue. Also, in extreme cases, Check your UEFI BIOS, for how the Fn key works. My Lenovo Ideapad3 had a weird way to use the function key which i changed in Bios.
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Added lenovo
Thought I would just update this thread, after testing many, I finally found a very nice keyboard. In case anyone happens across this topic…
Under £25 and feels high quality, wired so no radio waves/battery issues etc, keys are nice. It has garish gamer colours you can make it glow with, if that’s your thing! It certainly isn’t mine!
All in all very happy, especially for that price.
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This thread might merge with the other as we find solutions for the keyboard use cases we currently have. I will reach out to @tqcharm about his other solution.
Thanks for this.
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Well, I am happily using mac keyboards on Fedora. Coming from a mac, the most important tweak for me was to swap the Ctrl and Cmd keys (that is, to continue using the thumb instead of pinky finger for the Ctrl+[Some-Letter] key combinations. The easiest way to do this is via GNOME Tweaks: Keyboard → Additional Layout Options → Ctrl position
The rest of customization can be easily obtained via keyboard shortcuts. No need to alter system-wide xkb config files.
If you’re referring to the use case of having two different keyboards with separate keyboard setups, this is the post describing one possible solution:
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