Microsoft overstepped the bounds here. This cannot stand.

There is a Copilot key on my brand new Dell laptop. This will not do.

When confronted with unwanted change, one must compensate. I don't know who those people at Microsoft think they are, but this is my computer, and I will decide what the keys on my keyboard do, thank you very much.

I recently replaced my beloved Renegade (Dell Inspiron 13-7378 laptop) with a newer version of the same thing: a Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 DB04255 named Forrest. I absolutely love it.

The first thing I did was wipe the SSD and install Linux Mint, so, obviously, there is no purpose for the dedicated Copilot key that Microsoft shoved down my throat without so much as a howdy-do. This article is primarily here in case I need to remember how I did the remapping.

keyd to the rescue

keyd made this so easy I could barely believe it. When you do the obligatory web search for a solution, you come away with a dizzying array of competing options. This is not at all unusual in the Linux world: too many choices. As Dave Matthews put it, it's a typical situation in these typical times.

After digging through the trove of options, I settled on keyd and set about giving it a spin. I usually start with my platform's package manager, but keyd wasn't there. So I dropped over to Github to see what the deal was.

The developer has done a great job with the documentation, and it didn't take me long to get a sense that it might not be very difficult to get this up and running on my Linux Mint system.

Here are the steps I took:

First, I made sure I was in my home folder. That's where I chose to have a new keyd folder/subdirectory/directory created. Then I dropped these lines in a terminal window, one at a time.

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

Then I created my configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/keyd/default.conf

In preparation for the configuration data I was about to discover, I put:

[ids]
*
[main]

. . . then I saved that and went to find out what entry I needed for my situation.

Keyd has a built-in function that helps you find out what you need to know. I typed:

sudo keyd monitor

Then I pressed the Copilot key. I was presented with this info:

keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  leftmeta down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  leftshift down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  f23 down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  f23 up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  leftshift up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0  leftmeta up

Armed with this information, and based on several examples of other key remappings, I added another line to my /etc/keyd/default.conf file.

[ids]
*
[main]
leftshift+leftmeta+f23 = rightcontrol

. . . then I restarted the keyd daemon:

sudo systemctl restart keyd

And it works! It was really simple, and very satisfying. A huge thank you to rvaiya, the developer of keyd.

Keyd and the remapped key is are things that work.

Microsoft has earned another bullet on my "Most-Hated Entities" list.
Free Open Source Software continues to make me very happy.