How to 'make' a Euro / Sterling Key In Linux

I never had to deal with the problem of handling foreign currency symbols, given that the countries I’ve lived in the past use the same terminology, where the only difference is the prefixing of their respective country name to the word ‘dollar’.

But living in the Eurozone and for being so near to the UK, the idea of expressing money in dollars is relatively quaint experience to them as much ‘a quid’ is to me. This difference is visibly noticed when it comes to computer keyboards.

Keyboards for Europe with the exception of the UK have their default currency symbols mapped to the ‘€/£’ symbol by default - there are key other layout quirks which make these keyboards infuriating to use but I’ll leave them for another day.

Even though I still reflexively swap Euros for Dollars in my daily conversations, at least my ‘foreign’ accent helps people to contextually frame what I meant, but typing ‘$’ signs when you mean ‘€’ certainly confuses people. My workaround in the past was to type ‘Euros’ at every instance when I mean currency, which is really becoming tiresome.

So, the impetus aside, here’s a quick tutorial to show you how to generate a Euro sign.

First, we need to find out the keycodes of the keys that we want to remap. We do this by invoking ‘xev’, which traps all keystrokes and mouse movements. The keys we want to trap are the currency symbol, which is usually the same key as the numerical key ‘4’ on the alphabetical side of the keyboard, and the right ‘alt’ key, which I will use as the special shift key to get € and £ without losing the $ symbol. A capture of xev looks like this:

% xev
KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,
  root 0x6b, subw 0x0, time 2804155, (256,85), root:(807,409),
  state 0x0, keycode 13 (keysym 0x34, 4), same_screen YES,
  XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (34) "4"
  XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (34) "4"
  XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,
  root 0x6b, subw 0x0, time 2804251, (256,85), root:(807,409),
  state 0x0, keycode 13 (keysym 0x34, 4), same_screen YES,
  XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (34) "4"
  XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,
  root 0x6b, subw 0x0, time 2807796, (256,85), root:(807,409),
  state 0x0, keycode 108 (keysym 0xff7e, Alt_R), same_screen YES,
  XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
  XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
  XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,
  root 0x6b, subw 0x0, time 2807933, (256,85), root:(807,409),
  state 0x2000, keycode 108 (keysym 0xff7e, Alt_R), same_screen YES,
  XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
  XFilterEvent returns: False

ClientMessage event, serial 34, synthetic YES, window 0x2800001,
  message_type 0x11a (WM_PROTOCOLS), format 32, message 0x118 (WM_DELETE_WINDOW)

There’s a number of other events being truncated so that I’m only showing the relevant portions. The first two keypress/keyrelease set shows the keycode for ‘4’ as 13 and the second set shows that my right ‘alt’ key has the keycode of 108.

Armed with these numbers, let’s create a .xmodmaprc file in your home directory:

keycode 108 = Mode_switch
keycode 13 = 4 dollar EuroSign sterling

Once the file is created, to activate the change immediate, simply issue xmodmap:

% xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc

And viola*, by pressing ‘right alt’ + ‘4’ gives me ‘€’ and ‘shift’ + ‘right alt’ + ‘4’ gives me ‘£’!

* Don’t even get me started on umlauts and accents ;P

#Linux