Debian – KDE How to switch between 4 keyboard layouts

debiankde4keyboard-layout

I have KDE 4.14.2 on Debian 8.1 installed. When I have 3 layouts, switching META+Spacebar works perfectly. The problem begins when I am adding 4th layout, switching works incorrectly: I'm only able to switch from 1st->2nd layout, when I click switch layout shortcut in other cases (2,3,4) it does not work at all, so that 2->3, 3->4, 4->1 do not work at all.

I found some workaround to this: I have checked spare layouts option, so now I am able to switch between the most usable 3 layouts. But anyways I use 4. I couldn't find any solution of this on the internet. How to fix this?

Best Answer

Solution : untick the spare layout option for your layouts.

You should not use the spare layout option. This behaviour is perfectly sensible given that option (it is exactly what it is meant to do):

According to some KDE doc (pdf, html):

Spare layouts

This option can be enabled only if you have more than two layouts.

Spare layouts allow to toggle between small number of layouts easily while keeping more layouts handy close by. For example you might use 3 languages: English, Ukrainian and German but first two are used often and third one just occasionally. In this case you can configure first two as main layouts (setting Main layout count : 2) and German one as spare one - when you toggle with keyboard and left mouse button the switch will happen between main layouts only but you can always choose 3rd layout with context menu.

(…)

You should probably have a look as well at this question at superuser.sx

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You can set

localectl set-keymap --no-convert <keymap>

Which will change the keymap used at startup. Substitute keymap here with the one you'd like to use. Also ensure that you change your other locale information.

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For some reason it works if you -print and pipe the output to xkbcomp:

setxkbmap \
    -I ~/.config/xkb/ \
    -rules evdev-local \
    -layout "my-us(mdvp)" \
    -print |
    xkbcomp -I ~/.config/xkb/ - "$DISPLAY"

I don’t think there is anything wrong with your layout. I tried setting it up with setxkbmap directly, but even with the -verbose option the output is not helpful:

Warning! Multiple definitions of rules file
         Using command line, ignoring X server
Warning! Multiple definitions of keyboard layout
         Using command line, ignoring X server
Trying to build keymap using the following components:
keycodes:   evdev+aliases(qwerty)
types:      complete
compat:     complete
symbols:    pc+my-us(mdvp)+inet(evdev)+terminate(ctrl_alt_bksp)
geometry:   pc(pc104)
Error loading new keyboard description

This is with the default verbose level. But even if I set it to 10, which is apparently the max level, it just outputs “locale is C” as well as where it tries to look for the rules file, in addition to the above. It does not output anything more about why it fails to load the keyboard description.

One of the reasons why I prefer to pipe to xkbcomp instead of just using setxkbmap is because the former seems to give better error messages.

Best Answer

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