Following a post at fascinatingcaptain, I tried remapping F1 to the g key, as my g key has bitten the dust due to mechanical reasons. I added an entrykey <FK01> {g} ;(getting the g by copypasting) to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc then as per blog I didsudo rm -rf /var/lib/xkb/*rebooted and voila, no keys at all work. I cant log in except as guest, and can't think of any way to fix this except conceivably booting from a usb, which Id have to go make on some other computer , and I don't know if I can edit root files that way. Im in the opposite of terminal land, with mouse only to operate my computer. Logging in as guest (no password required) allows me to bring up a gui keyboard....on which all keys have been mapped to question marks. Recovery mode gets me to a shell with working kb but the filesystem is read only. Anybody have some ideas?
keyboard remap has killed keyboard
keyboard;xmodmap