rvaiya/keyd

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5916 stars · 273 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

keyd is a system-wide key remapping daemon for Linux that works at the kernel input level (evdev/uinput), independent of the display server. It supports layers, tap/hold key overloading, per-keyboard configs, and QMK-like features via a simple config format.

Use cases

• remap caps lock to escape system-wide on linux
• create custom keyboard layers like qmk on a normal keyboard
• use different keymaps for different keyboards on the same machine
• remap keys in a wayland compositor like sway
• keep my keymap working when switching to a virtual terminal
• swap ctrl and esc without breaking modifier semantics
• remap keys per-application on x11 and gnome

When to choose

• you want display-server-agnostic, system-wide key remapping on Linux
• you want QMK-style layers and tap/hold overloading on a regular keyboard
• you want a fast, tiny, Unix-philosophy daemon with a simple config format

When to avoid

• you need to program individual key up/down event sequences
• you are on macOS or Windows
• you want a GUI configuration tool

Facets

application · maturity active

developer-tools configuration-management operating-systems developer-tools cli keyboard-remapping evdev uinput keymap wayland x11 daemon layers qmk-like command-line linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rvaiya/keyd")