I've tried adding keyboard shortcuts for home/end and arrow keys to improve my productivity. Luckily, KDE makes it really easy to customize this. Unfortunately, it seems these only work in a few select apps. This is what I've tried:

Home:
1. Open "Standard Shortcuts"
2. Search for "Beginning of line"
3. Set "Alternate" to anything you'd like
4. Re-open a few apps, see if it works

Left key:
1. Open "Custom Shortcuts"
2. Click "Edit", "New", "Global Shortcut", "Send Keyboard Input"
3. Add any trigger
4. Set "Action" to "Left"
5. Re-open a few apps, see if it works

These work perfectly fine in Kate. The Home shortcut works in no other app I've tried. The left key also works in VSCode and Firefox but also doesn't work in a ton of other apps. Is there a particular reason for this other than it being a bug? Can I set these on a lower level to where they are actually applied to everything? Thanks!

It totally depends what other apps you tried, if those are GTK apps the shortcuts will not apply, different codebase, different shortcut system.

Can I set these on a lower level to where they are actually applied to everything?

Try to read about Xmodmap. I cannot help you more, since I am not a specialist in remapping. I was just able to reassign F12 key to "home" through creating file ~/.Xmodmap with the following content:

Code: Select all

$ cat ~/.Xmodmap
keycode 96 = Home



where keycode I obtained with xev command:

Code: Select all

$ xev
. . .
KeyRelease event, serial 40, synthetic NO, window 0x8a00001,
    root 0x23e, subw 0x0, time 11399712, (484,-87), root:(484,527),
    state 0x10, keycode 96 (keysym 0xff50, Home), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False
. . .


For me this works seems in all applications. Just only combination Shift+F12 works not everywhere.

Hope, this example will help you.

Hi!

Depending on what you want to achieve, there are multiple possibilities. Do you want to map keys or trigger scripts on pressing them?

Using keys for different things is possible, but not with every key as the keys are (hardware-)grouped in blocks on your keyboard. These blocks are divided in rows and columns and depending on the hardware the keyboard-controller will not recognize every combination the user might press. But you can for example remap the Numlock to be shift lock — but you cannot remap the key 'n' to be shift lock (on most keyboards. Depends on how these blocks are wired.). That is why the best working shortcuts are those using a level-key like alt, meta, super, hyper with another key.