Bug 56277

Summary:	More than 4 keyboard layouts
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	v_2e
Component:	Server/Input/XKB	Assignee:	Daniel Stone <daniel>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.7 (2012.06)
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description v_2e 2012-10-22 10:40:12 UTC

Hello!
  As I was trying to help my fried set up more than 4 keyboard layouts on his PC (and constantly failing, and not getting any idea about what is going wrong), I found out that 4 keyboard layouts is a kind of "built-in" limitation in current X-server versions.
  So, my questions are:

- Why is there such a limit of 4 keyboard layouts? (actually, why is there ANY limit on keyboards layout number?)

- Is it possible to implement the bigger number of keyboard layouts support in X? Or maybe, remove any limitation at all?

Thank you!
  Vladimir

Comment 1 James Cloos 2012-10-22 12:40:56 UTC

The original intent was to support four “columns” of symbols per key.

Later, xkeyboard-config arranged those “columns” into what was
originally a single “column” so as to allow mutiple layouts to
be loaded at once with the hope that doing so would allow fast
switching between a few (up to four) frequently used layouts.

The layout language is sufficiently complete to permit one to
define keys or key sequences which load (a) new layout(s).

Such a set of layouts could accomplish what you want.

I don’t know of any existing examples to which I could point.

The xorg-docs package includes XKB-Config and XKB-Enhancing.

Also goog for XKBlib.pdf and XKBproto.pdf.

Comment 2 v_2e 2012-10-22 14:15:33 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 19501 ***

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