I ran into the same issue a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685966

No, it doesn't. I use keyboard normal mode sometimes for things other than navigation, like seeking audio, etc

In my case, the interval is set to 0.5 which has a slight delay but enough for me to not mind. I usually have a mental idea of what mode I am in at all times.

> Can I somehow change the cursor system-wide?

Check the arch wiki article on Cursor themes[0]. Generally,, DEs have nice support for switching cursor themes after startup. In either case, you would need to modify `xkb_swapper.sh` to set a cursor theme whenever the mode is changed.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cursor_themes

Oh cool, I hadn't noticed that you were actually around here on HN! Thanks so much responding!

> In my case, the interval is set to 0.5

I noticed that more frequent updates of the status bar do eat away at the battery, though. :\

Somewhat related: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula. This is the same concept but with VR.

> e.g. keep Ctrl-D as page down.

I tried doing the same using xdotool by binding Ctrl+F<something> to PageDown but for some reason it didn't work for some reason and I didn't investigate enough.

I believe a possible reason is that the OP used xkb, which if I'm not mistaken is lower level than xdotool (so xdotool would not suffice)

I am the OP. What I tried was something along these lines.

e.g. to get w in normal mode to send Ctrl+right, I did the following.

1. Bind w to F14 in normal mode.

2. In i3 config, add `bindsym 0xffcb exec xdotool key ctrl+Right`

If I simply ran the command (`xdotool key ctrl+Right`) in normal mode, it would work but it didn't work via a binding.

This was infact the initial idea behind all this but after quite some testing xdotool turned out to be unreliable so I repurposed it as a shortcut layer.