Xfce Forum

ddwmusic

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 28

(Customized) Dvorak layout plus iBus... possible?

I have one of those "let's put two things together that maybe don't belong together, and try to make it work" questions...

For many years (like, about 20 years), because of a repetitive strain injury, I've been using a custom Dvorak layout that is a mirror image of the standard one. Normal Dvorak leans more heavily on the right hand, but my right hand is weaker, so it works better for me to flip it. No OS has a reversed layout, though, so I made my own by hacking /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us. By itself, that works great. I do not want to go back to QWERTY.

I work in China. Chinese language input is useful. In the last Ubuntu version I used, I could install ibus and it would use the reversed Dvorak layout, even triggering the pinyin character selector for Chinese.

But, a couple of days ago, I tried the same thing (Ubuntu Studio 16.04, xfce 4.12) and I found that ibus clobbered my custom layout. The custom layout is still in the X11 symbols file but I couldn't find a way to choose it from the ibus input method selector (actually I couldn't find a way to choose any Dvorak layout at all -- it was stubbornly enforcing the default US layout and only the default).

Any solution for this? Currently my hacked layout is under "English (classic Dvorak)" -- if I could enable that for use with ibus, I'd be golden.

Thanks,
James