A Recent and Simple Customization

I own a nice mechanical keyboard with many keys, like the left and right super keys I've had rebound
as alternative control keys until recently.  For many years, I was stuck using the Ncurses targeting
of GNU Emacs, and UNIX-style terminals generally ignore the super key.  This was frustrating because
Emacs largely reserves the super key for the operator's customizations.  One particular annoyance is
the command dabbrev-expand, bound to M-/ by default, which I'd rather have bound to s-SPC.  I wasn't
able to use that binding for years, so I settled for M-SPC, the default binding of the command just-
one-space I still regularly use.  Even now, with a super key in use, Emacs won't recognize s-SPC for
some reason, and M-SPC is easier to strike on this particular keyboard, so I'd sooner bind just-one-
space to s-SPC than continue with my previous preference.  I however only wanted to enable one of my
super keys, not both; my banal customization was unnecessarily difficult to determine and carry out.

For years, I used this command to get my keyboard settings in place close enough to how I like them:

 setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps -option altwin:ctrl_win dvorak

My most recent GNU/Linux system properly installs the dvorak keyboard layout in the virtual TTYs and
login screen, which is nice, and that command has the ``Caps Lock'' key act as an additional control
key alongside both super keys; my problem came entirely from the obtuse and ancient system in place.

In Emacs, and just about any reasonable system, I can rebind a key by asking the machine to change a
key, giving to it the key, and then answering the machine when it enquires about the new definition.
This requires seconds of my time.  With X11, an organ or rather tumor of UNIX, it can't be pleasant.

My keyboard also features one menu key, which I for a while tried to use as an alternative super key
in Emacs alone.  My customization set the menu key to a mapping wherein I defined what I wanted, but
I noticed parts of Emacs' interface that behaved differently than expected with this, the minibuffer
particularly, and did away with it.  I much later learned about the C-x @ s chord which calls event-
apply-super-modifier and bound to it my menu key, yet repetition of such chords when held down holds
not from what I noticed when using this, and I refused to compromise on something so very important.

I was writing recently and wanted to insert an em dash, which I've bound to s--, but couldn't.  Such
finally enraged me enough to settle this pathetic matter.  I'm aware of the xev tool, a program that
shows the X events, in the X11 distribution I use.  As X11 is a UNIX program, and most UNIX programs
are dead in their interactivity yet undead in their ability to persist, xev must represent events in
a form acceptable to other tools in the distribution so that they may be copied, pasted, parsed, and
perhaps result in something useful.  I was unable to use any of the information reported by xev with
the xmodmap program and I furthermore couldn't find useful guidance from the man pages I read.  At a
point I was inspecting keyboard definitions rivalling me in age.  All of this work was for something
Emacs does effortlessly, because Emacs is a living program which can remember data between commands.

This is once again that problem of visibility, where simply asking the computer its goings-on is the
entire problem.  Early scientists knew that human calculators with adding machines and the like were
much slower and more prone to error than a machine which had no need to forget and re-enter figures;
keeping data in the machine where it can be manipulated further was the entire point.  How nice that
this problem gets reinvented on automatic computers by some of those most disgraceful modern idiots.

Countless time has been wasted on adding many knobs to these systems by those people who bothered to
understand them.  My problem was using a pre-packaged option, and seemingly venturing outside of it.
An acquaintance eventually asked ChatGPT for assistance, with the machine revealing the existence of
one option suiting me.  Rather than learn anything, I merely found another pre-packaged option; were
I to need something simple someone had not already thought to do, I'd still be struggling with this.

I was pulled away from my machine for some menial labour during such, and thought to myself how nice
it was to be anywhere except that computer after spending so long on something so utterly worthless.

This ordeal took roughly half an hour.  Following is my new command with a single character altered:

 setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps -option altwin:ctrl_rwin dvorak

I used a floating group in StumpWM to make xev easier to use, and the next day this managed to crash
it when I swapped back to using a single screen.  I was unable to figure out where I could send more
commands to StumpWM, my state was also rather new after accidentally letting the machine lose power,
so it was much easier to reboot the computer.  Even the good software is riddled with such problems.

I know: Only a fucking idiot could think most software to be not worthless, not less than worthless.
.