keyboard switch

[asrael-2]

Hi everybody

I'm using Icewm for quite a while. Very nice thing to have...
There's one thing though that bothers me and forces me to switch to
gnome desktop ... it's switching the keyboard layout.

I'm not very pro in linux, but managed to add the following lines to my
xorg.conf

Option          "XkbLayout"     "us,de"
Option          "XkbOptions"    "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"

so now i got two layouts to "toggle"

but the thing is, i'd need about 4 or 5. plus French layout, Arabic and
Russian, too. This would be the maximum for the next 4 years i guess.
maybe Spanish some day as well ;-)

so in gnome desktop thingy i can add a switch in the panel. is there
anything like that in Icewm? Coz in my actual setting i got 2 layouts
and the scroll led indicating which is on. with more than 2 layouts it'd
get confusing, and anyway i didn't find alternatives to "toggle" ....

thanx anyway

yves

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[Ken Moffat-4]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 12:33:50PM +0100, asrael wrote:
> Hi everybody
>

 Hi.

> I'm using Icewm for quite a while. Very nice thing to have...
> There's one thing though that bothers me and forces me to switch to
> gnome desktop ... it's switching the keyboard layout.
>
> I'm not very pro in linux, but managed to add the following lines to my
> xorg.conf
>
> Option          "XkbLayout"     "us,de"
> Option          "XkbOptions"    "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"
>
> so now i got two layouts to "toggle"
>

 Nice, I guess you are familiar with both layouts, so that is good.
 
> but the thing is, i'd need about 4 or 5. plus French layout, Arabic and
> Russian, too. This would be the maximum for the next 4 years i guess.
> maybe Spanish some day as well ;-)
>

 For anything not using a variant of the latin alphabet, using
alternate keyboard layouts sounds like the way to go (except for
languages using scripts, like arabic -for that you might want to look
at the available gtk2 input methods, and XIM, for your gtk2 apps.

 BUT, if you change the keyboard layout, you'd better be familiar
with how it looks (or have a real keyboard in that layout handy).
For me, using a real qwertz keyboard (instead of qwerty) isn't too
bad, but azerty was very difficult.

 In the meantime, there are other ways of writing the accented
letters you need for latin alphabets, like ä, á, à, â, ç, ñ, ß and
even some others like æ, ð, þ, ő, ā, ą, č, ł - provided you are
using UTF-8 locales.

 The US keyboard layout in X includes dead keys and compose keys.
See /usr/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose if your X is in /usr
(you probably need to be using at least xorg 6.9 for this to work
correctly, I got it working on a slightly older version, but only by
adding some key AltGr definitions to my Xmodmap).

 I'm using the en_GB layout.  Some of these characters are accessed
directly with AltGr + letter (s for ß), some use AltGr + symbol as a
dead key, e.g. AltGr + ; for dead_acute,  AltGr + Shift + [ for dead
ring (åů), and for others you need to define a compose key (Multi_key)
in Xmodmap (and in xorg.conf for gtk2 apps).

 I prepared a hint on this for linuxfromscratch last month (because
I'd like to study some languages, and make notes using the keyboard
instead of pen and paper), it probably contains more detail than
you'll ever want, but it might be helpful.  It's at
http://www.kenmoffat.uklinux.net/hints/Accented_Latin-UTF-8.txt

 Unfortunately, it won't help with cyrillic (or greek) alphabets,
but you may find it saves you having to learn some of the keyboard
layouts.
> so in gnome desktop thingy i can add a switch in the panel. is there
> anything like that in Icewm? Coz in my actual setting i got 2 layouts
> and the scroll led indicating which is on. with more than 2 layouts it'd
> get confusing, and anyway i didn't find alternatives to "toggle" ....
>

 That is an interesting question, let us hope someone knows an
answer !

ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce

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[James Cloos-9]

>>>>> "asrael" == asrael <moncolonel@...> writes:

asrael> I'm using Icewm for quite a while. Very nice thing to have...
asrael> There's one thing though that bothers me and forces me to
asrael> switch to gnome desktop ... it's switching the keyboard
asrael> layout.

You can run setxkbmap(1x) to change the keyboard layout at runtime.

You can therefore configure menu entries for each layout you want.

As an example, you might add this to ~/.icewm/menu:

menu Keyboard keyboard {
     prog DE keyboard setxkbmap -layout us,de -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -option grp_led:scroll
     prog FR keyboard setxkbmap -layout us,fr -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -option grp_led:scroll
     prog RU keyboard setxkbmap -layout us,ru -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -option grp_led:scroll
     prog AR keyboard setxkbmap -layout us,ar -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -option grp_led:scroll
}

That would give you the US keyboard as your primary and the selected
one as your secondary.

Also, note that you can have up to four layouts configured at a time.
I tend to use « -layout us,gr,ru -varient ,,phonetic » and I also
have « -option compose:menu » so that I can use the menu key to enter
compose sequences.  (I also use « -option grp:ctrls_toggle » to ensure
that the toggle does not interfere with any X clients and recommend
the use of « -option grp_led:scroll » to let you know when a secondary
layout is selected.)

This does have the downside that the only ways you know which 2ndary
keyboard is in effect are to remember what you last chose or to test
it out.  One could, however, write a tasklet for icewm that shows an
icon representing the current layout config.  (setxkbmap -print will
output the current settings; the code that uses can be re-used to
instead output an icon or set of icons.  As an example, my current
full config gives me:

"pc(pc105)+us+gr:2+inet(evdev)+ru(phonetic):3+group(ctrls_toggle)+ctrl(nocaps)+altwin(super_win)+compose(menu)"

for xkb_symbols.  From that you can see that «us» is the primary
layout, «gr» is secondary, «ru(phonetic)» is tertiary and several
other options are also selected.  Code could use that to output a
US flag in the upper left quadrant, a GR flag in the upper right,
a RU flag in the lower left and just transparancy in the lower
right quadrant.  Or, it could have icons the same size as the
taskbar icons and set them next to each other, like:

        US GR RU

Instead of using flags you can of course also use text.

It shouldn't be too hard to write, if anyone is up for a short
challenge....

-JimC
--
James Cloos <cloos@...>         OpenPGP: 0xED7DAEA6

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[Adam Pribyl]

On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, asrael wrote:

> but the thing is, i'd need about 4 or 5. plus French layout, Arabic and
> Russian, too. This would be the maximum for the next 4 years i guess.
> maybe Spanish some day as well ;-)
>
> so in gnome desktop thingy i can add a switch in the panel. is there
> anything like that in Icewm? Coz in my actual setting i got 2 layouts

I do not know about it. You can try to search some applet/docklet that is
able to dock into icewm try.

> and the scroll led indicating which is on. with more than 2 layouts it'd
> get confusing, and anyway i didn't find alternatives to "toggle" ....
>
> thanx anyway
>
> yves

Adam Pribyl

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