Bart Broere

Freelance Developer

Remapping the GPD Pocket 3 keyboard for Dvorak using XKB

24 Jul 2024

If you’re used to the Dvorak keyboard layout, you might have a hard time using the GPD Pocket 3. In a QWERTY layout the ; is to the right of the L. GPD moved this to the right of the spacebar on the Pocket 3. The location of the ; is used for the letter s in the Dvorak layout. That means a very frequently used letter is no longer on the home row, defeating the purpose of the Dvorak layout quite a bit.

This was done on Ubuntu 24.04. Your experience on other Linux distributions might vary.

I found the following remapping quite easy to get used to:

(Although not related to the GPD Pocket 3 specifically I also remapped Caps Lock to Control.)

Note that these changes are applied on top of simply switching to the Dvorak layout:

Original layout Changes on top of setting the layout to Dvorak

In practice this results in the following changes to the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc config flle.

--- pc.bak	2024-05-14 08:04:51.859190653 +0200
+++ pc	2024-05-14 08:54:16.902085341 +0200
@@ -4,11 +4,11 @@
 
     key  <ESC> {[  Escape  ]};
     key  <TAB> {[  Tab,  ISO_Left_Tab  ]};
-    key <CAPS> {[  Caps_Lock  ]};
+    key <CAPS> {[  Control_R  ]};
 
-    key <BKSP> {[  BackSpace,  BackSpace  ]};
+    key <BKSP> {[  Return  ]};
     key <BKSL> {[  backslash,  bar  ]};
-    key <RTRN> {[  Return  ]};
+    key <RTRN> {[  s, S  ]};
 
     // The extra key on many European keyboards:
     key <LSGT> {[  less,  greater,    bar,  brokenbar  ]};
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@
     key <PAUS> {[  Pause,  Break  ], type="PC_CONTROL_LEVEL2" };
 
     key  <INS> {[  Insert  ]};
-    key <DELE> {[  Delete  ]};
+    key <DELE> {[  BackSpace, Delete  ]};
     key <HOME> {[  Home    ]};
     key  <END> {[  End     ]};
     key <PGUP> {[  Prior   ]};

Note that this configuration only takes effect in X. Your remap does not apply yet for example when booting and unlocking the full disk encryption.

The configuration change also does not survive some updates, so you might need to restore it from time to time.

It might be better to achieve the same results with xmodmap. I have not yet done this successfully though. If my current solution of modifying the XKB config gives problems, I might try xmodmap next.

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