How to remap keyboard buttons in Linux

27 Jun, 2026

We have a laptop with a broken arrow key. It's quite annoying! I wondered how easy it would be to remap a different key to be the right arrow key? Turns out it was dead easy on Linux.

This can be achieved using an application called Keyd. This was painless to install from source on Pop_OS.

This also works system wide, and is not limited to your user session.

git clone https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd
cd keyd
make && sudo make install
sudo systemctl enable --now keyd

Once installed, you need to edit the config file at /etc/keyd/default.conf. Mine now looks like this as I remapped the Right Ctrl to be the right arrow key.

The ids section lets you filter events from specific keyboards or mice. I don't need to do this, so I left it as * which means 'everything'.

[ids]
*

[main]
rightcontrol = right

Once this has done, reload keyd by running sudo keyd reload and you should be set. Per the documentation, if you need to remap different keys you can run sudo keyd monitor

Reading keyd Monitor Output

...
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	d down
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	d up
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	leftshift down
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	d down
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	d up
keyd virtual keyboard	0fac:0ade:bea394c0	leftshift up
Basilisk X HyperSpeed Mouse	1532:0082:86d19e94	leftmouse down
Basilisk X HyperSpeed Mouse	1532:0082:86d19e94	leftmouse up
...

When you run sudo keyd monitor, it shows you all key press events. Using this, I was able to determine I needed to remap 'right'

#100DaysToOffload #How-To #Linux