How to put some keyboard layout aside from layout switching ring

gnomekeyboard-layoutxkbxorg

What I need is to

switch between Russian and English layout with my favorite shortcut (namely Shift-CapsLock)
switch to Belarusian layout with another shortcut (say, Ctrl-RightShift, but actual binding doesn't matter)
while Belarusian layout is active, switch back to Russian/English with Shift-CapsLock

Is it possible with xkb at all? If so, how can this be done?

Best Answer

Three useful commands:

1. Get the current keyboard layout, from this topic :

setxkbmap -print | grep xkb_symbols | awk -F"+" '{print $2}'

Returns layout(variant) where variant is optional

2. Know if the current keyboard layout is layout(variant):

 setxkbmap -print | grep "layout(variant)"

Or without "(variant)".

Returns nothing is not.

3. Set the keyboard layout to a specified value:

setxkbmap layout variant

Where variant is optional.

(see man setxkbmap for more informations)

What you can do:

1. Create a simple executable (chmod +x file) script that changes the keyboard layout on the fly, depending on the current one. For instance, if we deal with the first point:

#!/bin/bash

if setxkbmap -print | grep "us"
then
  setxkbmap ru
else
  setxkbmap us
fi

2. With your keyboard shortcuts manager, assign the Shift-CapsLock keys to this script.

Good luck!

Related Solutions

Custom keyboard layout without root

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

Three useful commands:

What you can do:

Related Solutions

Custom keyboard layout without root

Related Question