Xfce Forum

emmeka

Member

Registered: 2021-11-10

Posts: 1

Add keyboard layouts from evdev.extras.xml to xfce4-keyboard-settings

Recently I wanted to switch to trying a EurKEY keyboard layout after years of typing with altgr-intl. This layout is already included in xkb, but under /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.extras.xml for exotic/niche layouts instead of just the basic evdev.xml.

My problem is that the keyboard setting GUI, xfce4-keyboard-settings, only seems to see layouts from the base evdev.xml file. Is there any way to enable the GUI to see keyboard layouts from the extra file? In gnome, this is doable. It is possible to enable seeing layouts from all sources with:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources show-all-sources true

And before anyone suggests that I do this instead, yes, I can change the layout by either using setxkbmap eu or putting Option "XkbLayout" "eu" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf. This works. The problem is that since xfce4-keyboard-settings doesn't know this layout, this entirely breaks the keyboard settings GUI, which still thinks I'm using altgr-intl. This is bound to confuse me eventually and I'd rather just be able to see all the layouts that are already installed in the settings GUI.

I also tried manually editing the keyboard-layout file in the xfce settings editor so that the GUI reflected the layout I was actually using, this did not work, as the GUI did not seem to know what this layout was (not surprising since it's apparently not checking evdev.extras.xml). And lastly, I do know that I could just copy paste the layout from evdev.extras.xml into evdev.xml, but it's entirely possible updates would break that later and it's also a far less ideal solution than just being able to see all layouts in the GUI.