I found some old HID IR Remote - https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_62442/merkmale.html and combined the usb dongle with a learnable universal control. It was straight forward to use left, right, up, down, enter, back and escape which makes most of the kodi functions accessable, but I missed access to context menues - things you access hitting "i" and "o" on keyboard. On the other hand, the functions keys which are discreatly mapped to IR-Codes on the delock remote. The solution is a custom key map file that maps function keys to kodi functions - https://kodi.wiki/view/List_of_keynames An example is https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/system/keymaps/keyboard.xml To find out what remote key codes which keyboard key the cli tool "evtests" was great help. Result is ~/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/keymaps.xml: <? xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8" ?> < keymap > < global > < keyboard > < F