2011-01-28

XKB and groups

This is really short because of the time, but I just found out that Gnome's keyboard switcher uses XKB's notion of groups internally. If you have USA as your first preference and United Kingdom as your second preference, it maps UK in as Group 2.

This messes stuff up if you've doctored up your own custom symbol file that uses multiple groups. I just spent a good day trying to figure out why this didn't work, and it turns out it's because of that.

The moral of the story is: keyboards added in Gnome's keyboard switcher (System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts) will get mapped in as groups and override any groups you have in your symbols file, so make sure and use only one layout, or modify your symbol file to use, say, groups one and four, instead.

I'll write a post on how to configure the control key to switch groups tomorrow or something. And a post on how to actually add new symbols to a keyboard. There seems to be a lack of XKB documentation out there.

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