This appears to be the following upstream bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25262 ...Which is marked "WONTFIX (or rather a CANTFIX)". I'd actually be fine with this if someone could tell me how to enable mouse -> keyboard navigation as a system-wide xkb setting. The mouse key bindings appear to be present in /usr/share/X11/xkb/compat/mousekeys , and I already use my own layout in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us_de . Is there some way I can explicitly refer to/include the compat/mousekeys bindings from my symbols/us_de layout?