I would say one definition of 'way too big' is how big it seems when the patch goes wrong and you have to try and undo its work (ideally having forgotten to back anything up like I tend to do).

It does change an absolute shed load of stuff.

I can see the attraction of using something a bit smaller and easier to add/remove - particularly with the tarmak stuff where you only need it temporarily

I can see where dreymar is coming from, on the 'if you don't need it, just ignore it' but the issue is if something goes wrong with xkb then its a *nightmare* to fix, because of the nature of what you're doing - tinkering with your only means of input to the machine. Therefore anything which reduces the need to mess with xkb files is a good thing to my mind.

I do recommend backing up your xkb folder before patching. That's what everyone recommends isn't it? ;)

However, as bph says it can go horribly wrong if you lose your keyboard because of some system hangup. I hate it when that happens, yes indeed.

Part of "the nightmare" is about to go away I hope. Instead of patching, I'll make a script that backs up and then replaces the xkb files. That way, undoing will be as simple as sudo copy-paste as long as you haven't done anything to those files yourself (which doesn't play too well with patching anyway). In addition, that'll let the careful copy over only the files they want (such as the extend file for instance) – at the cost of not seeing the changes in the system menus and having to run setxkbmap at startup instead, that'll be a very system safe alternative! This option is available already as I've provided the changed files, but it means having to understand what the various files and the options in them do as well as their names.

The Truly Ergonomic will solve the ergonomic problems of a standard staggered board that the WideAngle mod solves. It'll let you make Extend-like mappings; but Colemak[eD] is neither of those things. It's just my AltGr and dead key mappings, along with locale variants for a lot of locales including ours. Not sure what the keyboard lets you do with those? Usually, it's done in the OS as Key Events while the keyboard itself handles scan codes.

very cool - especially the names, the pegasus hoof!

i think you can get teensy based things to sit in between, 'on the wire' as it were, as well but the pegases hoof is more tidy

i'm pretty tempted actually - thanks for the link

Haha, yeah. Good luck pushing this upstream to the Ubuntu/XKB maintainers. They need to have a strict filter not to allow anyone and everyone to contribute their own layouts (i.e., they need to filter out layouts that are not relevant for most people, or not a standard layout for some human language). Remember, being user friendly means not offering way too many choices. The keyboard layout modifications we're talking about here are definitely on the fringe.

But, by all means, DreymaR, you could always try to submit your patch to their bug tracker. Just make sure it will run against their latest git head. Color me impressed if you make it!

And this is the reason i created xmodmap files instead. :-)

My patches are not easy even to myself. I couldn't make a nice little step-by-step for you without teaching you the ins and outs of xkb pretty much, and by then you wouldn't need it. If you want to learn the basics, there are some nice pages at the arch wiki for instance.

That's my feeling about it anyway. I've been working with this wonderful but complex format for a long time now and I think I'm getting the hang of it...

When we move from patches to changed vs original files, it'll be easier to see where everything fits in I believe. Then you can compare the changes with a file comparison tool such as Meld (Linux) or WinMerge (Win).