10.6 Keyboard Layout

To specify what each key of your keyboard does, you need to tell the operating system what keyboard layout you want to use. The default, when nothing is specified, is the US English QWERTY layout for 105-key PC keyboards. However, German speakers will usually prefer the German QWERTZ layout, French speakers will want the AZERTY layout, and so on; hackers might prefer Dvorak or bépo, and they might even want to further customize the effect of some of the keys. This section explains how to get that done.

There are three components that will want to know about your keyboard layout:

• The bootloader may want to know what keyboard layout you want to use (see keyboard-layout). This is useful if you want, for instance, to make sure that you can type the passphrase of your encrypted root partition using the right layout.
• The operating system kernel, Linux, will need that so that the console is properly configured (see keyboard-layout).
• The graphical display server, usually Xorg, also has its own idea of the keyboard layout (see keyboard-layout).

Guix allows you to configure all three separately but, fortunately, it allows you to share the same keyboard layout for all three components.

Keyboard layouts are represented by records created by the keyboard-layout procedure of (gnu system keyboard). Following the X Keyboard extension (XKB), each layout has four attributes: a name (often a language code such as “fi” for Finnish or “jp” for Japanese), an optional variant name, an optional keyboard model name, and a possibly empty list of additional options. In most cases the layout name is all you care about.

Scheme Procedure: keyboard-layout name [variant] [#:model] [#:options '()]

Return a new keyboard layout with the given name and variant.

name must be a string such as "fr"; variant must be a string such as "bepo" or "nodeadkeys". See the xkeyboard-config package for valid options.

Here are a few examples:

;; The German QWERTZ layout.  Here we assume a standard
;; "pc105" keyboard model.
(keyboard-layout "de")

;; The bépo variant of the French layout.
(keyboard-layout "fr" "bepo")

;; The Catalan layout.
(keyboard-layout "es" "cat")

;; Arabic layout with "Alt-Shift" to switch to US layout.
(keyboard-layout "ar,us" #:options '("grp:alt_shift_toggle"))

;; The Latin American Spanish layout.  In addition, the
;; "Caps Lock" key is used as an additional "Ctrl" key,
;; and the "Menu" key is used as a "Compose" key to enter
;; accented letters.
(keyboard-layout "latam"
                 #:options '("ctrl:nocaps" "compose:menu"))

;; The Russian layout for a ThinkPad keyboard.
(keyboard-layout "ru" #:model "thinkpad")

;; The "US international" layout, which is the US layout plus
;; dead keys to enter accented characters.  This is for an
;; Apple MacBook keyboard.
(keyboard-layout "us" "intl" #:model "macbook78")

See the share/X11/xkb directory of the xkeyboard-config package for a complete list of supported layouts, variants, and models.

Let’s say you want your system to use the Turkish keyboard layout throughout your system—bootloader, console, and Xorg. Here’s what your system configuration would look like:

;; Using the Turkish layout for the bootloader, the console,
;; and for Xorg.

(operating-system
  ;; ...
  (keyboard-layout (keyboard-layout "tr"))  ;for the console
  (bootloader (bootloader-configuration
                (bootloader grub-efi-bootloader)
                (targets '("/boot/efi"))
                (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout))) ;for GRUB
  (services (cons (set-xorg-configuration
                    (xorg-configuration             ;for Xorg
                      (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))
                  %desktop-services)))

In the example above, for GRUB and for Xorg, we just refer to the keyboard-layout field defined above, but we could just as well refer to a different layout. The set-xorg-configuration procedure communicates the desired Xorg configuration to the graphical log-in manager, by default GDM.

We’ve discussed how to specify the default keyboard layout of your system when it starts, but you can also adjust it at run time:

• If you’re using GNOME, its settings panel has a “Region & Language” entry where you can select one or more keyboard layouts.
• Under Xorg, the setxkbmap command (from the same-named package) allows you to change the current layout. For example, this is how you would change the layout to US Dvorak:

  setxkbmap us dvorak
  

• The loadkeys command changes the keyboard layout in effect in the Linux console. However, note that loadkeys does not use the XKB keyboard layout categorization described above. The command below loads the French bépo layout:

  loadkeys fr-bepo