Is there a *nix that will allow me to configure more than 4 keyboard layouts?

DavidMcCann · 12-22-2017, 11:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sarojane

What I don't understand is what's telling the system (and where it's telling it) what it's supposed to do with these XkbLayout and XkbVariant things. We're just assigning them something here, and it's intuitively clear what those assignments are, and what "layout" and "variant" mean, so how those assignments are going to affect how our system works for us, but the system has no intuition, so somewhere these connections have to be being made. I *really* don't want you to tell me the answer to this specific question.

Well, I'll resist! So, ask yourself
1. What does a keyboard driver do?
2. From a programmer's point of view, what do the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ files look like?
3. Look at /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev and see how it connects to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

I don't know any accessible place that explains keyboards simply (and this is just in the GUI: the console is quite different) — basically I collected little bits over time and wrote my own documentation!

Quote:

I have us driver in twice because I want both variants of it. When I'm typing in Spanish, I want to get accents by typing a quote before a letter. When I'm trying to type in a piece of code, I want a quote to be a quote. (You can type a quote and a space to get a quote, which isn't too bad, but there were other issues like this that I kept tripping over.)

If you look at the source for "us international" you can see that "apostrophe" and "quotedbl" are listed — you can get them with AltGr and AltGr-Shift. Alternatively, you can enable a Compose key and use Compose followed by apostrophe and a to get á as I've just done. And a third option would be to modify the standard us layout so that you have entries like
key <TLDE> {[ grave, asciitilde, dead_tilde ]};

One of the things about Linux is that there are so many ways to do everything!

_roman_ · 12-22-2017, 12:33 PM

Always look into the documentation:

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/d...KB-Config.html

@ sarojane

I think the source is the X server and not the kernel.
Those desktop environments just use the x server and alter it in my point of view.

These days teh X server usually configures itself semi automatic. in the old days you needed to create an xorg.conf with input devices, monitor, gpu and such.

--

off topic: for some reason I need the new type of xorg.conf in gentoo for the binary nvidia drivers
Directory: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
Files: 20opengl.conf nvidia.conf

--

The only coding language I learnt properly was C. I suppose all config or script files are in just some language. But which one I can not really tell. Also gnu linux heavily relies on those shells, so many config files are in some sort of shell syntax. They often talk about "posix shells" but I never really bothered diving deeper to grasp what it really means.

DavidMcCann · 12-23-2017, 11:10 AM

Now there's a thought: create an xorg.conf file and see if you can put more than four layouts in it.

If I were doing one for my computer, the keyboard section would look like

Code:

Section	"InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Keyboard0"
	Driver	"evdev"
	Option	"XkbModel" "pc105"
	Option	"XkbLayout" "pc+inet(evdev)+gb+gr:2+astro:3"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "caps:internal_noshift"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "grp:menu_toggle,grp_led:scroll"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "altmin:super_win"
	Option	"XkbOptions" "compose:menu"