Well, you can do something like "press one key to select Level5, then the other key's lv5+ mappings are what you want"; that's what my Extend layer is about. Some modifiers in XKB are mapped that way; pressing one lv5:<key>_switch_lock modifier selects lv5 while pressing two of them locks lv5 for instance.

However, making a bunch of these is bound to get you into trouble I fear. You haven't got that many states to play with so I think that my Extend mapping layer is among the most advanced projects around. It has four extra mappings per key, using Shift and AltGr mods. That's quite a lot actually.

Learning a whole new keyboard is too much for me, so I'm trying out your progressive layouts slightly modified to my physically US keyboard used with a french layout - I've been using french keyboards for years.

However, there is a show stopper for me. I have a laptop with both a trackpoint and a trackpad, and the trackpad drives me crazy. When I had applied your patches and rebooted, Ubuntu 13.10 no longer recognised them as separate devices and I couldn't disable the trackpad.

So for the moment I unpatched and just added your colemak file and hacked the rules files and the french file.

Any ideas how I could go about debugging the patches?

I shall at least try adding the extended layer, or something like it - a number keypad would probably be more useful for me. I might also try out your wide layout mod.

I'll let you know if the problem comes up again.

I haven't been experimenting much lately, I haven't tried out the extended layer and I don't think I will. I shall probably modify the Alt-gr layer instead as I don't have much use for all the funny symbols on it. I shan't try the wide layout either because it would take my right hand too far away from the trackpoint on my laptop - that said, the idea is good.

I have however been fiddling with the different Tarmak levels because on levels 3 and 4 typing "po" is awful especially as I tend to use my ring finger for "p". So I've made myself a level 3 that puts the "rsdp" keys in place instead and puts "j" temporarily under the right pinkie. I shall probably go straight on to the full colemak after that. I have also added € to the "e" key on lv3, which is missing for us Europeans.

I like the numbers being on level 2 as on a typical french keyboard, that way there is plenty more space for symbols on level 1 - of course it is pretty horrible to get used to and longer numbers are less easy to type. I'm rather considering putting a number pad in level 3 near the Alt-gr key for easy one handed access. That would potentially free up a lot of space on level 2.

In your installation script you have a couple of udevadm commands to get the system to refresh its keyboard layouts. It never worked for me. Sometimes the changes weren't even incorporated after a full reboot. I found I often had to delete the contents of /var/lib/xkb/ for my edits to be taken into account. I'm running Ubuntu 13.10

Do you know of a french forum for variants of the colemak layout? I'd like to post my mods there.

just upgraded to 14.04

and as per every upgrade its beggared my keyboard up

so i delve back into the infamous patch and it doesn't work - agony all over again

so cue hours of manual cut and pasting

there has to be a better way!

i'm definitely never upgrading ubuntu again ;-)

@dreymar

which are the changed files? are they in your zip file?

I agree, just copying in a set of changed files would prob be a lot easier, e.g. replacing the existing ones as opposed to trying to patch them

all after making a backup copy of the xkb dir of course (made that mistake once and only once a few upgrades ago)

the best bit was rebooting after the upgrade and not being able to type the password to log in, had it reverted to qwerty? had it just lost the wide angle mods? etc. etc. the only way to find out was protracted semi-informed semi-lucky blind guessing..

the real solution to all this is to sweet talk someone at ubuntu to include the dreymar mods, tarmak, wide angle etc. in the same way that someone has seen fit to include colemak as standard - the wide angle mods are so good and they benefit all layouts i can't see any reason why they shouldn't be included. There needs to be a separate dialog in the settings->keyboard to specify geometry as opposed to layout ideally

then it would all just work straight out of the box - heaven..

What you want is the xkb-data package for Ubuntu. If you refresh that, all my changes should be gone apart from a few harmless files such as xkb/symbols/colemak.

However, I'm worried that the settings may get borked. I'm trying to figure out the ins and outs of layout choosing in the different distros with gsettings and all, but it's complex.

right - back on track now, copied the xkb dir over from my other laptop and I now have the wide-angle mods back, colemak and only a few probs with some symbols that I will fix soon

So my top tip is back up the xkb dir before an upgrade and copy it back after

This works almost correctly and is a *large* improvement over patching post upgrade

its nice to be able to use my laptop again..

Huh, that looks right up to the symbols component; there you should've had the extend and caps_switch symbols. How is your rules file working? In the GUI menus for the keyboard setup, can you see for instance tarmak if you search for colemak?

If you copied the files manually, you may have to purge the x server files (see the main topic). But I don't think it should be necessary in this case.

I see that in my setxkbmap script I've enclosed each entry in quotes, like this: -option "misc:extend,lvl5:caps_switch_lock". Maybe that's a good idea. But it looks okay from the verbose description.

I'll look into it. I was about to set up an Ubuntu virtual machine, better get cracking...!

my god - it is agony every single time no matter what you back up

every time it breaks in a subtly different way on ubuntu upgrade

i hate it with a passion - such a waste of time

every single time..

(note this is a rant against the ubuntu upgrade process not dreymars stuff - in fact his downloadable xkb dir has saved the day)

I'm suspecting that file ownership issues play a big part in the troubles encountered. I've stopped using 'gksu nautilus' as I've heard that 'gksudo' albeit nearly the same command plays better with ownership. If the xkb files change owner or permissions you may be in big big trouble.

I was worried for a while that something was wrong in my files somewhere, causing crashes. I don't think that's the case anymore – I certainly hope not. At any rate, a poorly made xkb file shouldn't crash anything but simply make that layout setting fail. I've certainly had my share of those during development!

Using setxkbmap you can actually avoid overwriting system files quite simply: The command is set to first look for a rules file from the current directory, and if that fails it'll search the default location! This means that you could make a copy of the xkb files from your system, copy/replace my files into that new copy, set the copied xkb directory as your pwd and run setxkbmap! You won't get the GUI changes that way but at least it's very safe! And of course, you can have a little script that runs setxkbmap from your xkb dir every time you log on.

The big challenge for me has been to find a way of making my changes installable with system GUI and everything, while also allowing for a less intrusive way. I think this may be it!

For that, you should've asked in the sister topic in my signature – that's dedicated to PKL. Also, did you read that topic and look at my pkl download?