GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 599200
Flexible keyboard layouts
Last modified: 2009-10-30 19:56:20 UTC
I know that a) problem is affecting small number of people but it still affects b) I know too less about Xorg kbd architecture to state if it is possible Currently the layouts differ between the countries. It poses problems for the people who for some reasons have to deal with multiple languages. For example UK keyboard differs from US by different placement of certain keys (", |, ~, ...). Polish keyboard is based on US but it contains national characters (such as ąęćń etc.). If I need to write something in Polish I need a) replace ą with a etc. b) switch the layouts which is disturbing c) switch to Polish layout (and have problems if I don't remember where a character is). Additionaly different people might want to have special character with the range of hand (for example scientist would like to have all greek alphabet while writer might want to use different interpunction) as looking for it in character map may be both disturbing and lengthly. Therefore I would like to propose adding additional key 'costumise' or similar to allow customisation of the layout. Also function to export/import keymaps would be nice (or known location in $HOME).
You can choose the layout based on the language, not only country. I am not planning to add customization for the layout. I recommend looking at xmodmap - it is the standard way of tweaking.
(In reply to comment #1) > You can choose the layout based on the language, not only country. > Well - you misunderstood me or I don't see how this information is relevant. Polish is used only in Poland and not UK. Therefore such layout as I described (combination of two layouts). I specified the UK keyboard as it is different then the US keyboard. > I am not planning to add customization for the layout. I recommend looking at > xmodmap - it is the standard way of tweaking. Isn't gnome keyboard settings overriding the X settings? ----------- Of course you are the developer but I belive that it makes the lives of people who uses heavily 2 languages at the same time harder (and I belive that this group rather grows). PS. Interesting - the upper estimate of esperanto users (esperanto have tweaks in keyboards layout options) is 2 000 000 (source wikipedia). Some time ago I heard about similar number of poles in UK - and we are rather small national group I belive.
> you misunderstood me Actually, I just wanted to make small expansion of your statement: "Currently the layouts differ between the countries" > Isn't gnome keyboard settings overriding the X settings? Good news for you: there is a special hook in GNOME to pick and use xmodmap files! > I belive that it makes the lives of people who uses heavily 2 languages at the same time harder There is us(intl) and other *intl* variants which are specially designed for multi-lingual usage. There is even one Canadian variant that uses 8(!) shift levels in order to accomodate a lot of characters. That's the way it works now. I am using 2 languages heavily - Russian and English. Never seen any trouble switching between two separate layouts...
(In reply to comment #3) > > you misunderstood me > Actually, I just wanted to make small expansion of your statement: "Currently > the layouts differ between the countries" > Oh. Sorry. > > Isn't gnome keyboard settings overriding the X settings? > Good news for you: there is a special hook in GNOME to pick and use xmodmap > files! > I see. > > I belive that it makes the lives of people who uses heavily 2 languages at the same time harder > > There is us(intl) and other *intl* variants which are specially designed for > multi-lingual usage. There is even one Canadian variant that uses 8(!) shift > levels in order to accomodate a lot of characters. That's the way it works now. > > I am using 2 languages heavily - Russian and English. Never seen any trouble > switching between two separate layouts... Well - may be it is because I use for all my live the Polish Programmer Layout which have the same keyboard as US Qwerty. However now I am in UK where layout is similar but few special characters is misplaced. As it happens that the special characters are misplaced it creates the problems (especially as I'm computer science student) - I don't know if it is a case with russian keyboard. Anyway - I'd like to create a keboard which would based on UK (as it is the layout I'm mostly using now) + few special characters. I belive it was in Word 6 (possibly other, probably OOo). I would appriciate to have a built-in, unified GUI to set everything (metacity shortcats, media buttons, xmodmap, ...) - I understend that is a more sophisticated then 90% of user need but I belive that rest 10% would really beneft.
As another option, I can advise creating and maintaining your personal xkb option (in a form of patch?), that would be applicable to any other layout. That way you'd have no troubles moving from UK to, say, Germany, France, ... The troubles to maintain fully customizable GUI in GNOME are way higher than benefits of those .. I'd doubt it is 10%, it is rather 1% is not 0.01% ;) For those who really want to edit XKB materials I can recommend using kbd layout editor by Simos Xenitellis: http://code.google.com/p/keyboardlayouteditor/