LEAP 15.4 KDE custom shortcuts, no autorepeat behavior

I love kde’s custom shortcuts. It allows me to use alt+j,k,u,m for left,right,up,down as well as others in almost every application.
The problem that has just surfaced when I installed Leap 15.4, and even with the newest kde installed from using “opi”
is that auto repeat is no longer enabled on these shortcuts. Now I have to tirelessly hit alt+j to go left 20 characters or just revert to moving my hand over to the arrows.
I was much more productive when the autorepeat was enabled for my shortcuts.

I realize this is more a KDE problem than an opensuse problem, but I was hoping maybe someone knew a quick workaround. I have tried almost every shortcuts solution linux has. I’ve spent a lot of time on this, it is important to me.
autokey was good, but it messed up with repeating, going past the point I wanted to stop too often.

KDE had almost perfect behavior, till this.

Is the problem repeatable logging in as a virgin user?

yes it is. It is also repeatable on a qemu/virt-manager arch linux virtual machine. it is definitely a kde issue

I guess I’ll have to settle for autokey
“opi autokey-common”
It doesn’t work as well, given that it runs a python script with each keypress. Of course there is a lot of flexibility in that too. When you use the text editor for a script in autokey-qt, the position of the cursor gets messed up. Easier to edit the files in another program.
files located at .config/autokey/data/<folders>/*.py
for the main: left,right,up,down,home,end it works decent enough. It’s when I add shift to those that things get hairy. It works, but it lags and so I select more than I want.
Using it, though, is making me productive again. autorepeat is a must.

go left:
so I add a new script
then I set the hotkey for “left” to be “alt+j”, then I set the script to be “keyboard.send_key(”<left>")" hit save, that’s it

select left:
add a new script
set the hotkey for “shift+alt+j”, then I set the script to be “keyboard.send_keys(”<shift>+<left>") hit save, that’s it

I was never able to get keyboard.press_key and keyboard.release_key to work reliably. But autokey is not unique in this regard.

just fyi

Things I’ve tried: Xmodmap (have to set left-alt to Switch_mode key which has plenty of compatibility problems, plus only map-to single key)
xbindkeys (using xdotool, xte, and another one I can’t remember), never worked right. Even taught myself some scheme.
tried to get Hawck working. taught myself lua while at it. Fixed some bugs, never got the daemon working correctly.

I always wanted to use wayland, but the shortcut thing was getting in my way.
I came across “keyd” and am impressed

sudo opi keyd ...
sudo systemctl enable keyd

sudo mkdir /etc/keyd
sudo nano /etc/keyd/default.conf
[ids]

*

[main]

[alt]
j=left
k=right
u=up
m=down
l=home
;=end
'=delete
i=esc

[alt+shift]
p=C-v
n=C-c
y=C-x


sudo systemctl restart keyd

also.

keyd --monitor

is extremely helpful

if anybody wants to take a look at wayland key mappers I suggest this site:
https://medium.com/@canadaduane/key-remapping-in-linux-2021-edition-47320999d2aa