TITLE: Spanish characters on a US International keyboard
LFS VERSION: 3.1 (should apply to all)
AUTHOR: David Ayers <fogey@mindspring.com>
SYNOPSIS:
My default keyboard is US International. I want to be able to write
Spanish text, using a keyboard modifier key (like Alt, Ctrl, etc) to,
for example, cause the "a" to become "á" (accent) by using the a key
in combination with a modifier key. This hint describes how I remapped
my Microsoft keyboard to use the Menu key as the modifier key. The
same general procedure should apply to any keyboard and any desired
mapping. Pressing the Menu Key in combination with certain letter or
symbol keys yields: á Á é É í Í ó Ó ú ü ñ Ñ ¡ ¿.
HINT:
Changelog
---------
Revision 1.1 2002/06/25 dca
Miscellaneous wording and format changes.
Information sources
-------------------
Linux Keyboard and Console How-To (essential)
X Window System User's Guide, Volume Three, Part Two, Chapter 14,
"Modifier Key and Pointer Customization: xmodmap
xmodmap(1)
My LFS system
-------------
LFS Version CVS-20020131
Linux 2.4.17
XFree86 4.2
XFce desktop
XF86Config (keyboard-pertinent portions):
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "XFree86 Configured"
Screen "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
EndSection
(Earlier versions of X may have Section "Keyboard" instead of Section
"InputDevice")
The X keyboard
--------------
The Linux keyboard and console is handled one way but X substitutes
its own handling. This hint considers only the X keyboard mapping.
The XFree86 keymap mechanism is much more limited than the Linux
mechanism. Since version 2.1, XFree86 will initialize its keymap from
the Linux keymap as far as possible. However, Linux presently has 256
possible entries per key, while X has only 4 entries per key (one for
each combination of Shift, Mod), so some information is necessarily
lost .
First, X reads the XF86Config file, where definitions of LeftAlt,
RightAlt, etc. might be found. - see XFree86kbd(1). In my system there
are no key definitions in the config file. Next, the kernel keymap
is read and the usually obvious keybindings are made. The X keymap
duplicates the kernel keymap as closely as it can.
Xmodmap is your friend
----------------------
Save your current X keymap.
$ xmodmap -pke > keytable
This will tell you how your keyboard is presently mapped. You can
easily correlate the listed keycodes with the keys on your keyboard by
looking at what the key does. For example, in my keytable I find lines
like
keycode 8 =
keycode 9 = Escape
keycode 10 = 1 exclam
keycode 11 = 2 at
keycode 12 = 3 numbersign
...
The above tells me that pressing the unshifted 1 key produces the
numeral 1, and <shift>-1 produces the exclamation mark.
To see the current the modifier keys assignment
$ xmodmap
which displays something like
xmodmap: up to 2 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):
shift Shift_L (0x32), Shift_R (0x3e)
lock Caps_Lock (0x42)
control Control_L (0x25), Control_R (0x6d)
mod1 Alt_L (0x40), Alt_R (0x71)
mod2
mod3
mod4
mod5
This says that both left and right shift keys produce the shift
function, etc., and the Alt keys produce the mod function.
Keysyms
-------
In the keymap, each physical key is associated with a keycode and with
one or more keysyms that describe what you get when you press the
key. Some obvious keysyms are 1, 2, 3, a, b, c, etc. Also, exclam, at,
and numbersign are keysyms for the characters !, @, and #.
To discover which additional keysyms are available for use beyond the
ones used in the current keymap,
$ less /usr/X11R6/include/X11/keysymdef.h
Look in the "Latin 1" section of keysymdef.h to see lines like
#define XK_exclamdown 0x0a1
The keysym name is "exclamdown". Its function is to print the
upside-down exclamation mark that is one of the Spanish symbols
needed. I decided to add these keysyms to my keyboard:
aacute, Aacute
eacute, Eacute
iacute, Iacute
oacute, Oacute
uacute, udiaeresis
ntilde, Ntilde
questiondown
exclamdown
The /etc/keys.es file
---------------------
Create a file containing the keycodes that are to be remapped. The
file can have any name and be located anywhere. Mine is named
/etc/keyes.es, mod 644 and owned by the user.
My keys.es file looks like this:
keycode 117 = Mode_switch
keycode 38 = a A aacute Aacute
keycode 26 = e E eacute Eacute
keycode 31 = i I iacute Iacute
keycode 32 = o O oacute Oacute
keycode 30 = u U uacute udiaeresis
keycode 57 = n N ntilde Ntilde
keycode 61 = slash question slash questiondown
keycode 10 = 1 exclam 1 exclamdown
The first line, keycode 117, assigns my "Menu" key to be the mod
key. For non-Microsoft keyboards, any unused key or perhaps one of the
Alt keys might be used as the mod key. You can get the appropriate
keycodes from your saved keytable file.
The remaining lines each have four keysyms listed, corresponding to
unshifted, shifted, mod-unshifted, and mod-shifted.
Final configuration
-------------------
Try it out. run
$ xmodmap /etc/keys.es
then
$ xmodmap -pke
to see that the new keysyms were added to the keymap. If it looks
good, add 'xmodmap /etc/keys.es' as the next-to-last command in your X
startup script. I use startx to run X and XFce from the command line,
so the xmodmap command goes in ~/.xinitrc. The last two commands in my
.xinitrc are:
# Modify keyboard mapping to add Spanish special characters
/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap /etc/keys.es
# Finally, launch XFce window manager
exec xfwm.
The console
-----------
When I remapped my X keyboard, the keymapping worked as expected in
all of my editors and wp applications. The same keymapping would also
be desirable for non-X apps like emacs and vim. It should be a simple
matter of editing the Linux keymap. I haven't done this yet. Perhaps
Real Soon Now.
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