[DEPRECATED] macOS keyboard shortcuts for Linux, via xkeysnail

This repo is deprecated. I recommend using AutoKey and my autokeyconf configuration tool to get macOS keyboard shortcuts on Linux.

Why?

Perhaps you want to use Mac keyboard shortcuts in Linux. This isn't a simple matter of swapping the ctrl and super keys, because:

• The terminal uses ctrl to send signals to the foreground process—e.g. you want ctrl-C to send SIGINT as usual.
• Text navigation shortcuts are completely different on Linux—e.g. on Mac cmd+shift+left will select to the beginning of the line, whereas Linux uses shift+home to accomplish the same thing.

What?

This repo contains configuration for the key-remapping utility xkeysnail, along with installation instructions for elementary OS (and probably other Ubuntu-based systems).

Inspired by kinto.sh, which I couldn't get to run on elementary OS due to python-vte not being available in any repositories that were acceptable to apt.

Installation

1. Clone this repo.
2. Install xkeysnail.

   sudo apt install python3-pip
   sudo pip3 install xkeysnail
   

3. Paste the following into ~/.config/autostart/xkeysnail.desktop so xkeysnail starts on login. Be sure to replace /path/to/xkeysnail-macos-keymap/run with the actual path.

   [Desktop Entry]
   Name=xkeysnail
   Comment=remap keyboard input
   Exec=sudo /path/to/xkeysnail-macos-keymap/run
   Type=Application
   

4. Add a sudoers config to allow normal users to sudo the run script without entering a password (replace ben with your actual username and the example path with the actual one). E.g. on Linux Mint (and probably Ubuntu), you can do:

   sudo su root
   echo "ben ALL=NOPASSWD:/path/to/xkeysnail-macos-keymap/run" >/etc/sudoers.d/xkeysnail
   chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/xkeysnail

5. Log out and log in.

Security

This is horribly insecure and you shouldn't use it.

The issue is that 1) the run script has to be sudo-able without a password, and 2) xkeysnail executes Python files which are probably owned by non-root users. The result is that anyone who can modify run or these Python files can execute arbitrary code as root when the user logs in.