Finding Prior Art to Kinto

While I was searching the twitterverse I found someone who actually started a similar project! So I decided to star their repo and checkout how they tackled the problem of making the Cmd key work under linux, more or less.

https://github.com/classilla/appmodmap

So in his repo you can look at the ammd.c source code and you will see that he actually calls for a very specific property, “_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW”, which I am familiar with due to my xprop script having called it in the past. Although with the functions in xlib you don’t necessarily have to call it directly. It is still nice to see how one would call that property if they want to.

To define what apps ought to use the cmd key layout you can peek into the config.h file. What surprises me though is that he was very specific in which GUI based apps he wanted to use with the cmd key. I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t apply cmd to everything BUT the terminal and then fix the Cmd position to behave as expected by mapping it to either Ctrl+Shift or Super, and if Super then remap the terminal use Super keybinds.

Regardless I am both happy and sad to report that I have not found an app that fully meets or exceeds the goals that I had set out to achieve with Kinto.sh . If you have any suggestions or things you would like to see added to Kinto that will make your Linux experience feel more like a mac then please reach out to me!