Disable evil page back/forward keys on a Lenovo T500 Thinkpad

Currently I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad T500. A fine machine. Apart from the awful keyboard layout. The ESC key is way too high, causing useless "F1" hits. But the stupidest thing on this layout is the placement of two evil evil keys that perform browser back and forward functions.

These keys are labeled with a page/document icon and arrows going left and right. I would really like to find whoeve r decided to place these keys there, and punish him with a couple of years of typing with his own keyboard layout :) It happened to me already a couple of times (even more, like right now for example) that I'm typing this long text in a browser text area, and then by accident I hit the evil "page back" key. Oops. F**k! And you just lost 10 minutes of editing because the browser is stupid and won't allow you to go back to your half-edited textarea. Isn't that great?. Fantastic, I'd say.

Today I had had enough of it. That's how you fix it:

Create a ~/.xmodmaprc file or similar, since the name doesn't matter, with the following content:


!
! Disable the idiot XF86Back and XF86Forward
! keys on the Lenovo T500 keyboard
!
! They mess up when editing textareas within
! the browser, causing so much waste of time and
! frustration.
!
! Cosimo, 23/Feb/2011

! XF86Back
keycode 166 = NoSymbol

! XF86Forward
keycode 167 = NoSymbol

And then run:


$ xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc

VoilĂ , done. Thanks, xmodmap and thanks unnamed Lenovo keyboard engineer.

One thought on “Disable evil page back/forward keys on a Lenovo T500 Thinkpad

  1. Pingback: Disable XF86Back/Forward | Gawen's blog

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