i3 and xmodmap

Maybe you tried to do something like this in your i3 config file:

exec --no-startup-id xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

…and found out that it doesn't work.

The culprit is /etc/default/keyboard¹. This file is read both when starting a TTY and X and will set up your keyboard configuration. This file looks like this on my machine:

# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="fr"
XKBVARIANT="latin9"
XKBOPTIONS=""

BACKSPACE="guess"

The problem, it seems, is that when you start X this file is loaded after your i3 config and it will overwrite your xmodmap settings. The only solution I found is to move the content of /etc/default/keyboard to /etc/default/console-setup². This way, you will still benefit from the default keyboard config in the TTY but no settings will be applied when you start X.

Then, you can manually execute setkbmap in your i3 config:

exec --no-startup-id setxkbmap fr && xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

I didn't specify all the parameters (variant, model…) but that doesn't seem to cause trouble so far.

If you have a better solution, please leave me a comment on my website's Github page.