Fixing a Keyboard Numpad (Non-)Issue

One problem I did encounter using KDE Plasma was that in certain applications the Numpad Delete key was not behaving correctly - in fact, it did not work at all.

Depending on how you use your Numpad keyboard, you may never encounter this problem. Back in the early days of Personal Computers (think 1980s), keyboards had no separate cursor block, only a Numpad. I got used to use my Numpad as cursor block and for the most part ignore the separate cursor block when typing. My wife hates me because I always disable Num Lock on her keyboard whenever I use it.

The funny thing was that the Delete key did work in some applications, but not in others. At first, I thought it might be an X or Wayland issue, but it affected both environments. 

I spent hours with the KDE keyboard settings, but nothing did help. After a lot of research I was able to identify the root cause: There is an open bug in Chromium (not sure if this is a Linux only issue or not) since July 2025:

• https://issues.chromium.org/issues/429730008

Since Chromium is used in so many applications (e.g. Chrome, Brave, VS Code, ...), from the outside it looked like a bug in the system. Fact is, this bug is still present in any Chrome based application today.

Update: It looks like after a year, the issue has now been fixed and will be released with Chromium version 152.0.7923.0. If you are not willing to wait, here is how I fixed it on my system:

The solution

The solution was to install a low-level keyboard remapping tool: keyd. This tool is available in the CachyOS extra repo.

After installation, but before you enable it, edit/create a configuration file:

Edit /etc/keyd/default.conf to include the following:

[ids]
*

[main]
kpdot = delete

Finally, enable and start keyd; sudo systemctl enable --now keyd

keyd is a very powerful tool which can do a lot more, but this is beyond the scope of this post.