Introduction
When running a Linux system in its graphical mode, keyboard mappings can be changed by using xmodmap.
Each key on the keyboard has a „keycode“ which can be found out by looking at the output of
xmodmap -pke > current-keyboard
or by running
xev
for trying out the keys.
I am using a modified German keyboard, but off course the ideas can be adapted to any setup.
Given setting as a Basis
You can start with any keyboard, for example with the German keyboard with no dead keys, which is often useful as a starting point. I prefer to modify it a little bit. This allows me to support more languages like Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Esperanto. Russian is an issue that I will address in another article. On the other hand it is a good idea to have secondary positions for some symbols that are on keys that might be missing on some physical layouts, like „<", "|" and ">“ on the German keyboard, whose key is just not present in the American keyboard. The third idea is to have two Altgr-keys, because many important symbols are just accessible in conjunction with Altgr and thus easier if there are two Altgr-keys like there are two Shift-keys.
Special characters for Esperanto
For Esperanto (Esperanto explained in Esperanto) the latin alphabet with its 26 letters is needed, even though some of them are never used. And on top of that the following letters are needed as well:
ĉ Ĉ ĝ Ĝ ĵ Ĵ ĥ Ĥ ŝ Ŝ ŭ Ŭ
Unfortunately they have not reused the letters commonly used in Slavic languages and present on many international setups:
č Č ž Ž š Š
but Unicode covers it all and as long as the keyboard does not need to support Slavic or Baltic or Sami languages simultaneously with Esperanto, things should be fine.
A reasonable approach is tu put these symbols on Altgr-C, Altgr-G, Altgr-J, Altgr-H, Altgr-S and Altgr-U.
This can be achieved easily:
Create a file
.xmodmap-ori
by
xmodmap -pke > .xmodmap-ori
.
And a script $HOME/bin/orikb:
#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-ori
Look up where the letters S, G, H J C and U are positioned on the keyboard in the xmodmap-ori-file.
Now create a file
.xmodmap-esperanto
using the following command
egrep 'keycode *[0-9]+ *= *[SsGgCcJjHhUu] ' < .xmodmap-ori
and edit it. Leave the part keycode
keycode 39 = s S s S scircumflex Scircumflex
keycode 42 = g G g G gcircumflex Gcircumflex
keycode 43 = h H h H hcircumflex Hcircumflex
keycode 44 = j J j J jcircumflex Jcircumflex
keycode 54 = c C c C ccircumflex Ccircumflex
keycode 30 = u U u U ubreve Ubreve
The numbers between "keycode" and "=" could be different on your machine, but the rest should be like that.
Now create two scripts
$HOME/bin/eokb
#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-esperanto
and
$HOME/bin/orikb
#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-ori
.
Do not forgot to do the
chmod +x $HOME/bin/eokb $HOME/bin/orikb
for your scripts... 🙂
Now you can use eokb for enabling the Esperanto keys and orikb to return to your original setting.
The Esperanto keys will be accessible by using Altgr and the Latin letter they are derived from.
Other language specific characters
In a similar way you can have other characters
å and Å on the A,
ë and Ë on the E
ï and Ï on the I
ø and Ø on the O
æ and Æ on the Ä
ÿ and Ÿ on the Y
ñ and Ñ on the N
< on the ,
> on the .
| on the -
This allows to write a lot of languages. See what works for you...
Remaining Issues
For Russian I have bought a physical Cyrillic keyboard and I am using it with the setup that is printed on the keys. I might write about this another time.
Generally I like to have two Altgr keys and I can very well live without a windows key. I might write about this another time as well.
Btw. this article has been written for Linux, but it works perfectly well with any other Unix-like system, as long as X11 is used, just think of Aix, HPUX, BSD, Solaris and likewise systems. But Linux is by far the most common unix like desktop system these days.
Here is another approach:
xkbmap
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