Frakkin-XKB

For some reason in Ubuntu or Xorg in general it is somehow quite hard to reliably configure custom XKB keymaps.

Description

xkbcomp is a way to load custom keymaps from e.g. your home folder. This allows one to customize keyboard layout beyond default options.

Problems

Calling xkbcomp in .xsession

The options won't effect devices plugged in later.

Setting the XKB keymap and options in /etc/default/keyboard

This trigger a udev rule which sets some variables which are then used by Xorg evdev driver. Problem is that using custom XKB rules with this will require editing files in /usr/share.

Also LightDM tries it's best to mess up the keyboard layout, but this should be fixable with ~/.Xkbmap.

Using udev rule to call xkbcomp

Xkbcomp needs to run as user running the X session, this requires some hacks. Additionally RUN+= rule in udev will block for duration of the script and this causes Xorg to wait until the script is finished and then to set the default options, overwriting our options.

Solution

Call xkbcomp from .xsession and using frakkin-xkb:

xkblayout.sh:

#!/bin/bash
xkbcomp -I"$HOME/.xkb" "$HOME/.xkb/keymap/default" "${DISPLAY%%.*}"

.xsession:

xkblayout.sh
frakkin-xkb xkblayout.sh

Frakkin-xkb listens for XInput events and when new devices are adeed, calls the given command.