In Linux Mint 20.2 how to execute xmodmap at startup

Question

I use Linux Mint 20.2 (with Mate desktop environment). I need to make permanent some modifications of the keyboard mapping, as explained in the chosen answer to this question. In other words, I need to execute the xmodmap command at each startup, and make it read its configuration file ~/.Xmodmap.

I have followed all the suggestions in this post, but with no success :(

Answer 1

Have you tried to use a cron job for this? Cron provides a @reboot parameter to schedule tasks that should run every time the computer is started up. It is used in the following way: Open crontab in a terminal as so:

crontab -e

It will ask you which text editor you would like to use, and then at the bottom of the file you could write the following

# assuming your ~/.Xmodmap file is a list of keycodes that xmodmap can read
@reboot xmodmap /home/<username>/.Xmodmap

It is important to use full paths because the $HOME variable is not initialized at boot time.

Hopefully this helps!