Fedora – Keyboard Layout with Sway on Fedora (Wayland)

fedorakeyboard-layoutswaywayland

I have recently installed Fedora 27 which I find quite nice, I like the Gnome Desktop, but for working I definitely prefer a tiling window manager. I would like to use Sway because I was using i3 before and now that Gnome uses wayland I would like to make the change.

I have a french azerty keyboard which is well configured in Gnome, but Sway uses an U.S. layout. I don't know how I can make the change permanently, I can make a script for changing layout each time Sway run but I find this an ugly solution… Is there any proper way to do it so Sway can use the proper keyboard layout?

Thank you

PS: I read that post but it did not help me, probably because I do not have enough knowledge regarding X.

Best Answer

In the current release, sway only loads XKB layouts from environment variables at execution time (XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT, XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT, XKB_DEFAULT_OPTIONS). Wayland does not provide a server like X, so each Wayland compositor has to implement its own method for setting or changing layouts -- generic tools like setxkbmap are out unless/until a protocol is defined/adopted that will allow the tool to talk to any compositor.

Eventually, sway will add the ability to change layouts during runtime. This pull request adds swaymsg input subcommands to set XKB options at runtime; it's presently in the development branch (wlroots). If it is released as in that PR, you'd be able to issue commands like these to change the keyboard:

swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de

Related Solutions

Switch between keyboard layout based on input event

You could do this with by configuring your keyboards separately. For example I use US English layout on my laptop keyboard and have a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard with german layout and I have the following in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf:

# Default configuration for all keyboards not handled explicitly
Section "InputClass"
     Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"
     MatchIsKeyboard "on"
     MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
     Driver "evdev"

     Option "XkbRules"   "evdev"
     Option "XkbModel"   "pc105"
     Option "XkbLayout"  "us(altgr-intl),de,ru"
     Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:menu_switch,caps:hyper,compose:ralt,grp:rctrl_rshift_toggle,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

# Match the external keyboard by USB ID
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Sun Type 6"
    MatchIsKeyboard "on"
    MatchUSBID "0430:0005"

    Driver "evdev"
    Option "XkbRules"   "evdev"
    Option "XkbModel"   "sun(type6)"
    Option "XkbLayout"  "de"
    Option "XkbOptions" "caps:hyper,compose:menu,terminalte:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

Keyboard layout change indicator

I didn't change my keyboard layout very often, but when i do it, i use (for exemple) :

setxkbmap fr

There's also an option to show the current layout of your keyboard :

setxkbmap -query

result :

rules:      evdev
model:      pc105
layout:     fr
options:    terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

Considering this, you could do something with the notify-send command to send the layout as a notification. Something like this :

notify-send $(setxkbmap -query | grep layout)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Switch between keyboard layout based on input event

Keyboard layout change indicator

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