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Virtually rewiring laptop keyboards

You may remember I had problems with my laptop a few months before, because it refused to boot until I unplugged the CMOS battery. This by the way happened again, to the point I need to remember to buy a new CMOS battery next time I’m in the States (the european prices are crazy insane, and I’ll be back reasonably soon). This is the start of a story for the same laptop, but it has nothing to do with the CMOS in this case.

I have recently replaced my work laptop with an HP Chromebook from the previous MacBook Pro I was using. If you’re curious for my reasons, they boil down to traveling too much, and the MBP being too heavy. I briefly considered an Air, but given the direction they go to, the Chromebook works better for the work needs.

If you didn’t know, Chromebooks don’t come (by default) with a Caps Lock key. Maybe it’s a public service, making it more difficult to shout on the Internet, maybe it’s because whoever designed the keyboards was nostalgic of the control key in place of the caps lock, I’m not sure. Instead of moving the control key, they introduced a new search button, which triggers the search box as well as function as a “Fn” modifier, to access features such as page up/down, home and end. I liked the approach and it’s actually fairly handy. Unfortunately it means that now I have a third way (in addition to the Asus and the Dell keyboards) to access these functionalities, which makes my muscle memory suffer badly. It also meant I kept typing all-caps on my Asus laptop when I tried using the modifier (and failed) and that was pissing me off.

On Apple USB and Bluetooth keyboards there is a Fn button, but it’s handled entirely in software. Indeed if you have one such keyboard, particularly the 60% version (those without numpad and separate isles for movement keys), and you want to use it on Linux you need to enable a kernel module to implement the correct emulation. I know that because it bit me when they first introduced it, as I was using a full-size Apple keyboard instead, and the numlock emulation was making me unable to type.

This is give or take the way it works on the Chromebook, mostly out of necessity of sharing the Fn modifier with the Search button. And it allows you to change which key is Search/Fn in software, which is handy. Why can’t I do that with my Asus laptop? Well, I can disable the Caps Lock at least, and replace it with Control like so many people do already, after all I use Emacs and they tell me it’s much better to use Emacs that way (I don’t know about it, I tried it briefly, but my muscle memory works better with the pinky-control). But that’s not exactly what I want.

I could try remapping Ctrl+arrows to behave the same way as Fn+arrows but that’s not quite what I want either because then I lose the skip-ahead/forwards that I want from Ctrl+arrows. So I need to come up with alternatives. Much as I wish this was going to be a step-by-step procedure to fix this, it’s not, and it’s instead a musing of what may or may not work.

The first option would be to implement the Fn in software, either by the kernel, X11 or libinput level. This could actually be interesting to make the Fn behaviour of Apple keyboards generic enough. I don’t really know where to start with that one, because between systemd, libinput and Wayland the input layers flow changed so much that I’m completely lost.

The other option is more daring and possibly more interesting: rewiring the laptop keyboard by changing what the keys actually send over the PS/2 bus. As Hector suggested over twitter, the keyboard is handled as part of the Embedded Controller (EC) firmware, and it is not untold of modifying a laptop’s EC although a quick search doesn’t turn up anyone doing so on an Asus laptop to change the keyboard scancodes.

Does it mean I can do it? Does it mean I will? I’m not sure yet. Part of the problem is that playing around with an EC is the kind of thing that can easily brick your laptop, and this is currently my only Linux environment in which I do actual work. I could try to re-target my HTPC to be a workstation, and then hack on this laptop like it’s disposable, but the truth is that I spend enough time in the air that I really want to have a laptop, at least as a secondary system.

The first problem is figuring out how run the update. The first step would be figuring out where the EC firmware is. In Matthew’s posts, he found a promising area of the update file within the image, based off a size and the (known) EC firmware version. In my case I don’t have that luck, since the only version I can see from the Linux host is the BIOS revision, which is 219. On the other hand, if I look at the Asus download page versions 212 and 216 explicitly mention an EC firmware update, so it would at least make it easy to verify whether my guess is right if I am to guess which area of the firmware image is the EC firmware itself.

But it might be easier. UEFITool supports reading these update files, as they are AMI Aptio capsules, and it should be possible then to extract a listing of object trees and checksum that tells you what actually changed between two versions. Unfortunately that would only tell you what and not how, but it’s a starting point. Unfortunately, the documentation of the tool itself already points out that many AMI features are not implemented because of the author’s NDA. Of course the moment when you look for aptio capsule format you find a post by Nikolaj’s about the AFU utility.

This may be a throw-in post just to give a random idea, or it may follow up with more details, and maybe some code to get the list of changed files in the capsule, but I have not started on this yet and I’m not sure I’ll do. The tools are out there, and it would be an interesting game to play, the problem is, nowadays, mostly the time.

Of the two options, implementing the second Fn key (without changing the one that is there) is obviously the one that has the most potential to be useful: if it can be made generic enough, it can be used on any keyboard, laptop or not, and might allow simplifying the Fn key handling in the Apple keyboards, by moving it away from a Apple-specific driver. So if someone has ideas of where this should fit nowadays, I’m happy to hear about those.

Comments 1
  1. If you want to use the capslock key as an alternative Fn style key you could look at the way Dreymar uses the xorg layer 5. I think that is the way that you want the capslock key to work, see https://forum.colemak.com/t… for a startbtw) Personally I would want the spacebar to act in that way, but never found out how to do this trick on a default keyboard with the spacebar instead (tap for space, but hold as Fn also known as spacefn for custom keyboards).

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