At 29 August, 2003 Adam Scriven wrote: > Hey all. > > I've been thinking recently about the Dvorak keyboard layout, and I thought > I'd set it up to test on my system. > > I'm not sure, however, to go about doing that exactly. Are there any FM's I > should R? I'd prefer, at least for now, if it was just a per-user thing, > and switchable at that, so I can switch back to Sholes (I think that's how > it's spellt, QWERTY basically) if I don't want to use it anymore.
Well, as long as you use X for most of your work, you could look into
doing it with xmodmap. A good tool for editing your layout -- although I
would assume there's already a Dvorak layout out there -- is xkeycaps
(in portage). The syntax is pretty straightforward. After you've got the
file prepared, you can load it in your .xinitrc, or, if you use GNOME
(as I do), you can set it as a manual startup item (as I do). I still
use QWERTY, but I remap some keys, like CapsLock (which I turn into a
fifth modifier used for diacritical characters.) If anyone's interested
in my .xmodmap, I can send that out for your perusal.
If you like your console too, then you'd probably have to mess around
with consolekeys. However, I think there's already a Dvorak layout
available for that -- though I don't know how you'd set that to load at
login and unload on logout. Loading at login could be done with your
.${SHELL}rc, but I don't know how you'd go about resetting it.
I would imagine that typing your name/password in QWERTY and everything
else in Dvorak would be confusing, though. If so, you probably want to
look at the keyboard stuff in /etc/rc.conf and set the console to always
use it there. Making xdm (gdm, kdm, ...) use a custom xmodmap is left as
an exercise to the reader ;-)
--
Andrew Farmer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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