Thanks for the great suggestions. I didn't realize the arrow button was generating escape all this time. And the suggestion of shift with -+' is great too. I can probably cram the bar, page up and page down keys on those.

I don't need the yen and euro which is why I was willing to give them up. But if the I could put braces on Fn-shift-,and reclaim them it would be a plus.

I may eventually want to use Chr as a meta key with emacs if I get that crazy. For now I think the hints you gave will be enough and I'll forget about having F1 to F10.

It would be nice to have some better docs on xkb; I was even down in the "compat" directory trying fiddle with the shift lock state machines there with no success.