arsenik/kanata

kanata

A modularized Arsenik that let you choose your features, e.g. angle mods, Vim-like navigation layer, Mac/Azerty/Qwertz support, etc.

• load kanata.kbd with kanata (installation instructions below)
• enable each feature by un-commenting the related line
• live-reload the configuration with Space+Backspace (requires layer-taps)

Configuration options:

• key arrangement: Mac or PC, with or without angle mod?
• base layer: standard, layer-taps, homerow mods?
• symbols layer: AltGr, QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY?
• navigation layer: ESDF or HJKL?

Note that kanata can also use the laptop’s trackpoint buttons (e.g. ThinkPad) as two additional thumb keys. :-)

Installation

You can install kanata by either downloading a pre-built executable, or by running the following commands (if you have rustc installed):

rustup update stable
cargo install kanata

Windows users might prefer the kanata_winIOv2.exe version as it fixes some weird bugs.

Linux users may want to run these extra steps:

Running kanata without sudo

kanata needs to intercept uinput signals, which it cannot do without the proper authorisations.

If you don’t want to run kanata with sudo, you’ll need to allow kanata to read from uinput. This requires the users to be part of both input and uinput groups.

For that, you first need to create a uinput group if it is not the case yet:

sudo groupadd -U $USERNAME uinput

Where $USERNAME is the target user (or users in a comma separated list), and add the target user (or users) to the group input:

sudo usermod -aG input $USERNAME

You can then check after relogin that both groups appear in the result of the groups command launched as the target user.

Finally, you need to add a udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-kanata.rules:

KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="uinput", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

Making a user-side systemd service for kanata

Note: This only works if kanata is able to run without

sudo

(and is using systemd).

Using a systemd service allows running kanata as a daemon, possibly right after logging in. Here is a template for a service file:

[Unit]
Description=Kanata keyboard remapper
Documentation=https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[Service]
Environment=PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
Environment=HOME=/path/to/home/folder
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/kanata --cfg /path/to/kanata/config/file
Restart=no

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Copy-paste it into ~/.config/systemd/user/kanata.service, fill in the placeholders, then run one of the following commands:

• systemctl --user start kanata.service to manually start kanata
• systemctl --user enable kanata.service so kanata may autostart whenever the current user logs in
• systemctl --user status kanata.service to check if kanata is running