Chapter 4. Layout Files

When QJoyPad saves a layout, it creates a file using that layout's name. Because of this, layout names must also be valid filenames. This shouldn't be very limiting, it just means that names can't contain certain special characters such as '/', '*', etc. Remember that most Linux file systems are case sensitive, so a layout named "Layout" will be considered distinct from a layout named "layout". On most modern file systems, spaces should be okay and there should be no serious limits on name length.

Whenever you create a new layout, QJoyPad makes a new file called Name.lyt in ~/.qjoypad3, where Name is the name that you provided. Whenever you update that layout, it overwrites that file to reflect your changes, whenever you revert, it rereads that file, and if you ever remove that layout, it will erase that file from your hard drive.

The format of these files isn't difficult to figure out, so you can edit them by hand if you like. The numbers used to represent keys are standard X11 keycodes.

It's also easy to share QJoyPad layout files; just copy them from one user's ~/.qjoypad3 directory to another and either tell QJoyPad to update the layout list by right clicking on the tray icon, or just restart QJoyPad. If you switch layouts through the command line, you don't even need to do that.