Setting up keyboard maps on GNU/Linux

Xorg

introduction

Here´s a choice for a few US International keymaps

altgr-intl  English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)
alt-intl    English (US, alt. intl.)
intl        English (US, intl., with dead keys)

The standard one is just intl, you got dead keys all around (need to type ´ then e to get é. It’s painful and slows you down when you don’t need internationalized keyboard, as you need to type ' followed by space just to get the tilde.

The alt-intl alternative is simply adding a few more dead-keys to it. See /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us for more details.

The right choice as far as I am concerned seems to be altgr-intl so far. You don’t have dead-keys there. You have AlgGr all the way.

It is worth mentioning the GB (UK) International flavor intl which behaves just like the US one. There are dead-keys.

It may be worth having a look at CA fr variant also. That´s a QWERTY with french accents and no dead-keys. However it s a very different kind of QWERTY… And it has the same disadvantage as the French one: it’s a specific layout and brackets are hard to reach.

setup

Configure keymaps

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
--> 101-keys (we do not use the windows key)
--> English (US)
--> US intl., with AltGr dead keys
--> default (AltGr)
--> no compose key
--> control-alt-backspace OK

dpkg-reconfigure locales
--> en_US.UTF-8

and here is THE TRICK to toggle language (XKBOPTIONS)

vi /etc/default/keyboard

XKBMODEL="pc101"
XKBLAYOUT="us,ru"
XKBVARIANT="altgr-intl"
XKBOPTIONS="terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,grp:alt_space_toggle"

BACKSPACE="guess"

as user

Thanks to dottedmag on freenode#xorg this is the right syntax, according to evdev rules. Layout and variant needs the same number of arguments: note the additional comma after altgr-intl when specifying two layouts.

# setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,grp:alt_space_toggle
setxkbmap -layout us,ru -variant altgr-intl, -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,grp:alt_space_toggle
setxkbmap -query
setxkbmap -query -verbose 10
setxkbmap -print
xmodmap
xset q

acceptance for altgr-intl

this is what we have altogether with altgr

¹²³¤€’¥×
äåéëþüúíóö«»¬
áßðfghïœø¶
ǽœ©®bñµç

with shift+altgr

¡½¾
ÄÅÉËÞÜÚÍÓÖ“”¦
Á§ÐFGHÏŒØ°
Œ¢®BÑµÇ

and this is what we need for French language

é  altgr + e

à  altgr + ` then a
è       altgr + ` then e
ú       altgr + ` then u

â  altgr + ^ then a
(same for ê, î, ô, û)

ç  altgr + ,

acceptance for altgr-weur

altgr-weur

¹²³£€šž‘’ß×
åäéèøùúíóò«»
áàëêûìüïöô
ấæçãîñõ¿

this is what we need for French language

é  altgr + e

à  altgr + s
è  altgr + r
ú  altgr + u

â  altgr + ^ then a
(same for ê, î, ô, û)

ç  altgr + c

«  altgr + [
»  altgr + [

Additional notes

ls -lF /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
grep dead_acute /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

ls -lF /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us
grep -dskip xkb_symbols.*intl /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/*

unused

# gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options
# udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=input --action=change

unfortunately it seems we cannot fully visualize internationalized keymaps with xkbprint

setxkbmap -print -model pc101 -layout us -variant altgr-intl > us.keymap
xkbcomp us.keymap
ls -lF us.xkm
xkbprint -label symbols us.xkm - | ps2pdf - > us.pdf

Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY

Setting up keyboard maps on GNU/Linux

Xorg

introduction

setup

acceptance for altgr-intl

acceptance for altgr-weur

Additional notes

Resources

physical layout

dwm

us intl

us altgr-intl

xorg

windows

tweaks

tools

visualize