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I usually bind the § key (on my Swedish keyboard) to toggling my terminal window, on all my systems. I recently switched from KDE to XFCE on my Debian laptop and bound the § key to a bash script in the Keyboard part of the Settings Manager.

To my surprise this makes my W key stop responding. In the terminal pressing it makes the cursor flash briefly, in other programs nothing happens. Shift-W works and produces a W.

If I instead bind Shift-§ (it shows up as Shift-1/2 in the settings) I don't get this problem (not even with Shift-W).

Why does this happen, and more importantly, how can I get around it?

(I would prefer to not bind another key since this is the only key on my keyboard I don't use.)

Edit (in response to a question from @eyoung100):

The output from setxkbmap -query -v 10 is

Setting verbose level to 10 locale is C Trying to load rules file ./rules/evdev... Trying to load rules file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev... Success. Applied rules from evdev: rules: evdev model: pc105 layout: se Trying to build keymap using the following components: keycodes: evdev+aliases(qwerty) types: complete compat: complete symbols: pc+se+inet(evdev) geometry: pc(pc105) rules: evdev model: pc105 layout: se
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    Something similar here with a Spanish keyboard. The only differences are the normal value for that key ("º" in my case) and the "lost" key, which for me is "m". Tried to debug it with xev, but something grabs both the right key and the one that is being masked out, before they reach xev. Commented Jan 1 at 17:42
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    Did you already read this? Commented Jan 8 at 0:35
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    @RafaelMori Interesting workaround, I will try xcape and/or ksuperk, thanks! It's funny though that I don't have the specific problem in that thread, I use my Win-key to show the whisker menu and that works great :) Commented Jan 8 at 10:10
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    @PeterJaric What is the output of: setxkbmap -query -v 10 Commented Jan 9 at 18:21
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    @eyoung100 I've added the output to the question. But I managed to work around the problem with xmodmap, so I'm currently quite satisified. I'll post my workaround as an answer for anyone else having this problem. Commented Jan 9 at 20:49

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I was pointed in the right direction by @RafaelMori's comment to my question, and managed to work around the issue by using xmodmap.

I didn't have an .Xmodmap file so I created one and added this line to it:

keycode 49 = onehalf onehalf onehalf onehalf

where 49 is the keycode reported by xev when I pressed the § key, and onehalf was the keysym of Shift-§ that I chose because it was what worked before, but I believe I could have chosen whatever other keysym that I didn't need.

Then I went into the Keyboard part of the Xfce settings and rebound the key for the particular command I wanted to be activated, and now it registered as ½ instead of §.

And now it works!

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  • Glad you found the answer. Commented Jan 9 at 22:05

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