Umlauts under US keyboard layout

[efAston]

Hi,

I'm running kubuntu 9.10 with the US Dvorak-international keyboard layout. I want to be able to enter the ä and ö characters as I also type in Finnish. I've tried holding Alt-Gr and pressing every key on the keyboard, and I get

23€5⁷8[êëüfgçrl/=\àôéûîfdtnß-âöèùïbmwvz´´à´àààà´à"A'"""""""""""A"A''

, which gives me an ö, but by pressing the q key with Alt-Gr, so I don't understand the logic behind it and still can't produce an ä. Does anyone know what's happening the US international keyboards and how I can produce an ä?

Cheers,
Aston

[semperfizh]

Hi,

I'm running kubuntu 9.10 with the US Dvorak-international keyboard layout. I want to be able to enter the ä and ö characters as I also type in Finnish. I've tried holding Alt-Gr and pressing every key on the keyboard, and I get

23€5⁷8[êëüfgçrl/=\àôéûîfdtnß-âöèùïbmwvz´´à´àààà´à"A'"""""""""""A"A''

, which gives me an ö, but by pressing the q key with Alt-Gr, so I don't understand the logic behind it and still can't produce an ä. Does anyone know what's happening the US international keyboards and how I can produce an ä?

Cheers,
Aston

I would suggest mapping a key to switch between finish keyboard in your case
and US keyboard

Cheers

[Zorael]

You can also use xmodmap to rebind what characters a given key (for your keyboard layout) will print. So with a simple script you could for instance rebind AltGr+a to output ä. Running 'xmodmap -pke' in a terminal will list the current mappings. To resolve what keycode a physical key represents, you can start xev (in a terminal), press the key and then look at the output, alternatively just find it in the xmodmap wall of text.

Concrete example;

$ xmodmap -pke | grep "a A"
keycode 38 = a A a A ordfeminine masculine
So it seems the key returning a has the keycode 38 on my layout (Swedish). The key symbols a, A, ordfeminine and masculine represent the characters it will return when pressed normally, with Shift, with Alt, with Shift+Alt, with AltGr and with Shift+AltGr respectively. It's possible to rebind what modifiers to use, but that's the default setup.

It's probably listed in some file someplace, but by merely looking at the output of 'xmodmap -pke' you get an inkling of what characters are available. adiaeresis represents ä, and Adiaeresis Ä.

So, to remap AltGr+a to be ä (and Shift+AltGr+a as Ä);

$ xmodmap -e "keycode 38 = a A a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis"
It used to be that you could merely save such lines in the file ~/.Xmodmap and it would be executed upon login, but at some point it seems this functionality was removed. So you need to create a script that executes it.

#!/bin/bash

xmodmap -e "keycode 38 = a A a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis"
Save it in ~/.kde/Autostart to have it be run automatically. Be sure to make it executable.

------------------------------------------

If you really want to adhere to the old ~/.Xmodmap behavior (for whatever reason), you can save the keycode line (sans 'xmodmap -e' and the quotes) in ~/.Xmodmap, and then have your script restore the earlier behavior by manually telling xmodmap to read the file.

#!/bin/bash

if [ -r ~/.Xmodmap ]; then
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
fi

[efAston]

Thanks Zorael. It seems funny that I have to modify the keyboard every time I boot, even if automatically, you'd think we'd be able to modify the keyboard layout itself. Even go back to the source with the modifications - to see if we can improve on the default. Maybe when I'm not such a newbie I'll think more about that.

[efAston]

Actually, it worked before I rebooted, but now that I've restarted it's back to the way it was before. I saved a file called "keyboard.sh" to /home/aston/.kde/Autostart with the entries you described.

[Zorael]

Is it set to be executable, or does Kate pop up and open it when you log in?

[efAston]

Kate doesn't pop up when I log in, how do I set it to executable?

[efAston]

Actually Wine does come up when I boot, and Wine is associated with .sh. How do I get it to execute?

[Zorael]

Right-click it in Dolphin, go to the Permissions tab and check Is executable.

Alternatively, in a terminal;

$ chmod +x ~/.kde/Autostart/keyboard.sh

[efAston]

Heh, I found the same just before reading this. Thanks heaps!