Keyboard Layout Configuration For Encryption Key, Virtual Console And Xorg

Wed, Jun 20, 2018 16:31 CEST

Tags: Keyboard, Xorg, Virtual Console

This post is about everything you ever wanted to ask about keyboard layout misconfiguration.

My keyboard layout is not setup for Xorg

Setup your keymap using setxkbmap when launching X, for instance in .xprofile

# ~/.xprofile
setxkbmap be
setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape

A more robust solution (wireless keyboard plug-n-play …) is to run the following

localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap be '' '' caps:swapescape

It will create a file located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf

# Written by systemd-localed(8), read by systemd-localed and Xorg. It's
# probably wise not to edit this file manually. Use localectl(1) to
# instruct systemd-localed to update it.
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbLayout" "be"
        Option "XkbOptions" "caps:swapescape"
EndSection

The option --no-convert inhibits the default behaviour of localectl which consists in trying to match the vconsole keymap configuration with the X11 keymap configuration. This default behaviour should work well with vendor keymaps but is not needed if you do a manual setup of the virtual console (see #something) and is unlikely to work for custom ones (see #i_want_my_own_keymap).

My keyboard layout is not setup for the virtual console

Write your chosen keymap in /etc/vconsole.conf

# /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=be-latin1

My keyboard layout is not setup for the encryption key

Put the keymap hook before the keyboard hook in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

# /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
...
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block keymap keyboard encrypt filesystems fsck"
...

I want my own keymap

Create your own keymap directory

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps
cd /usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps

Copy an existing keymap you want to customize

cp /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.map.gz personal.map.gz
gunzip personal.map.gz

Edit /usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps/personal.map

Point to it in /etc/vconsole.conf

# /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=/usr/local/share/kbd/keymaps/personal.map