Keyboard Input language Problems (Want to switch to Greek)

answered 2014-10-16 07:14:56 +0000

Adaephon
2299 ●3 ●16 ●42

updated 2014-10-17 06:00:10 +0000

If you add the following line to your i3 configuration it should work just like in Unity

exec --no-startup-id "setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us,gr -option grp:alt_shift_toggle"

If you use some variant of the these layouts you can also add the -variant option. For example, -variant euro,simple will use the euro variant of the us layout and the simple variant for the gr layout (same order as -layout). In order to use the default variant just leave it out, so -variant euro, will use euro for us, but the default for gr.

Also the above line assumes that a default 105-key PC-keyboard will be used. If you use anything else change the model accordingly.

With setxkbmap -query you can see what is currently set. If you run it before adding the above line to the configuration, you can see what is set by Xorg.

There is also the chance that Unity is using the same method to set multiple layouts (I do not use Unity, so I cannot check). So if you log in with Unity and just run setxkbmap -query you might get everything you need to set layout changing for i3 the exact same way.

For example, the output

rules:      evdev
model:      pc105
layout:     us,gr
options:    grp:alt_shift_toggle

would translate to the above setxkbmap command.

Have a look on this Arch Linux Documentation for more information. The 'Setting keyboard layout' section works just as well with Ubuntu.