Ubuntu – Change keyboard layout (English UK) on command line to English US

It should be enough to just add this line to ~/.vimrc:

set keymap=foo

Where foo is the name of your keymap. For instance, I tested with set keymap=greek and I was typing in Greek when I opened vim (of course, then I couldn't exit the thing but that's vim for you).

If that doesn't work for some reason, here's an ugly, hacky approach you could try instead. Add this to your ~/.bashrc:

vim(){
  setxkbmap XX ## change this to whatever keymap you use for vim
  command vim  ## launch the actual vim executable
  setxkbmap YY ## change to whatever your default layout is
}

Now, open a new terminal and use vim. The keyboard layout will be automatically changed for the vim session and changed back when you exit vim.

This is not a very good solution, however, because the keyboard layout will be changed for all applications. It simply does it automatically and changes back when you exit, but you will still have the new layout for all other windows, as well as vim. The first approach is much better.

After a lot of research I managed to overcome the problem by a somewhat bizarre solution. At least in my case the system seemed to be able to toggle between English and Greek after this approach.

• I added a 3rd language in the Configure layout... (in my case Spanish)
• Enable Spare layouts
• Also (I am not sure this is necessary but I followed that step also) I installed the 3rd language to Regional Settings dialog.
• After logout I was able to use the keyboard shortcut.

The funny thing is that I removed the 3rd language after that and it still works (I only kept English and Greek which was my initial intention).

Hope that this would be helpful to anyone facing a similar problem.