Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote:
On Sunday 25 June 2006 13:27, Robert Persson wrote:
I want to be able to use an international keyboard layout in X.
Something like the Apple U.S. layout would be really nice, but the U.S.
English Alternative International would do me fine for the moment.
I have no experience with gnome so can't help you there. To get the us
international keryborad layout now you should be able to do:
# setxkbmap us_intl
To get it permanently you can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the XkbLayout
Option in the InputDevice section that relates to your keyboard:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "???"
Driver "kbd"
[...]
Option "XkbLayout" "us_intl"
EndSection
Thanks Bo.
The problem I have is not in choosing us_intl, which is quite easy in
gnome. The problem is that I don't know how to get it so that when I
press either the alt or the win key I get all those extra characters.
There's a lot of terminology I don't understand. Am I trying to "switch
group" or am I trying to "choose the third level"? Both of these terms
sound like what I am trying to do, but which is which? Added to that is
all this business about alt being set or not being set to meta and so
on. I don't really have a clue when alt is actually alt and when it is
meta, just as I don't understand the difference between alt and option
when I am trying to run a remote linux session in Apple X11. So I end up
twiddling with the settings, trying one thing and then another, but I
haven't yet managed to get to those extra characters. Compare this to
macos, even very ancient version of it, where you get a very rich
keyboard layout out of the box. Not only umlauts, but bullets, ellipses
and the 2nd letter of the Danish alphabet are available at the press of
the alt/option key.
The second issue is that the US international keyboard, which I am
planning to use, isn't exactly ideal. It was designed for an ordinary
typewriter, where diareses and double quotes, as well as carets and
circumflexes, are identical. But it is the only extended US keyboard
readily available for X, which is the only reason I even consider using
it. However it is actually unusable on a desktop without the extra
modifier keys working because, where the standard US keyboard has
quotes, carets and tildes, this one only has dead keys.
And even when the modifiers are working, this layout is unnecessarily
awkward to use for someone writing predominantly in English because
frequently used characters, such as quotes, are harder to type than the
foreign language characters that are only used occasionally. As I said,
the Apple keyboard layouts are vastly superior. Unfortunately my
attempts to create a custom, Apple-like layout (when I was using KDE)
didn't work. I just don't understand xkb well enough.
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