Rulemak is there because of my request at klava.org page in vk. So the other variants may appear the same way quite easily.

My information may be outdated, but I do not remember anybody was using the "reverse" phonetic layout JCUKEN lately, this is a relic of Soviet era.

This is absolutely true. "Phonetic to QWERTY" is used much rarely than йцукен for russian typing.

I would agree to that, with the remark that same key  c == с is worst than the same key  x == x just because there are a way more words starting with "с" in Russian than the words starting with "х".

xkeyboard-config released version 2.20 including Rulemak as a Russian keyboard variant, so it will be available to Linux users out of the box (setxkbmap ru rulemak).

I also added the Ruble symbol ₽ to the layout on AltGr+8, where it was put on the standard Russian layout as well.

That might be a new trend in Russia, but at my time living there I do not remember of been using the Ruble symbol anywhere. It was just referred as "Руб." or "руб".
Heck, I do not think that that fancy sign existed at the beginning of 2000.
From Wikipedia for Ruble sign: "The design was approved on 11 December 2013". I'm so old...

Hi,

I'm considering to abandon the Latin (Colemak) letter plane on AltGr.  The original idea was to be able to type a few words in the Latin alphabet, like a URL or e-mail address, but I've never really used this feature myself.  It's just too awkward to use AltGr for anything more than a few consecutive letters.  Proper layout switching/shifting through a dedicated hotkey is probably more appropriate, than putting this "feature" in the layout itself.  I found no other layout doing that, either.

So this would make room for extra Cyrillic letters for other Slavic languages, and I have a good idea how I'd like to implement that.  Missing letters are:

Ukrainian and Rusyn: ґ є і ї
Belarusian: і ў '
Bulgarian: (no extra letters)
Serbian: ђ ј љ њ ћ џ
Macedonian: ѓ ѕ ј љ њ ќ џ (ѐ ѝ)
Montenegrin: ђ з́́ ј љ њ с́ ћ џ

Proposal:
Ukrainian and Belarusian letters on related Russian letters: г/ґ е/є и/і ы/ї у/ў.
Most Serbian and Macedonian letters on the preceding letter in the corresponding alphabet, to which they are phonetically related:
д/ђ ѕ/з л/љ н/њ т/ћ ч/џ, except ј/й (same sound), and Macedonian ќ and ѓ via accent combinations (possible AltGr positions would be on в and б, below Serbian equivalents т/ћ and д/ђ, respecively – Macedonian users will want to swap these).
Montenegrin accented letters з́́ and с́ have no Unicode character of their own, and will be composed through dead keys.

The goal is not to become a proper layout for each of these languages, as certain Russian letters will be useless and letter frequencies will differ (see Bulgarian discussion), but, to be like Colemak for Latin scripts and have the most common Slavic Cyrillic letters available for occasional use.  Of course the layout can be modified to anyone's native needs or taste.

Not in scope: the many historic Cyrillic letters, and non-Slavic languages using the Cyrillic alphabet, that would take us way too far.

Thoughts?

┌─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┲━━━━━━━━━┓
│ Ё ``│ ! ˝ │ @   │ №   │ $   │ %   │ ^ ¯ │ &   │ *   │ (   │ )   │ _ — │ Ъ + ┃ ⌫       ┃
│ ё ` │ 1 ´ │ 2 ¨ │ 3 # │ 4 ¢ │ 5 € │ 6 ˘ │ 7   │ 8 ₽ │ 9 [ │ 0 ] │ - – │ ъ = ┃Backspace┃
┢━━━━━┷━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┺━┳━━━━━━━┫
┃       ┃ Я   │ Ж   │ Ф   │ П   │ Г Ґ │ й Ј │ Л Љ │ У Ў │ Ы Ї │ Ю   │ Ш { │ Щ } ┃ Enter ┃
┃ Tab ↹ ┃ я   │ ж   │ ф   │ п   │ г ґ │ й ј │ л љ │ у ў │ ы ї │ ю   │ ш « │ щ » ┃   ⏎   ┃
┣━━━━━━━┻┱────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┺┓      ┃
┃ ⌫ Back ┃ А   │ Р   │ С   │ Т Ћ │ Д Ђ │ Ч Џ │ Н Њ │ Е Є │ И І │ О   │ Ь " │ Э | ┃      ┃
┃  space ┃ а   │ р   │ с   │ т ћ │ д ђ │ ч џ │ н њ │ е є │ и і │ о   │ ь ' │ э \ ┃      ┃
┣━━━━━━━━┻━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┲━━━┷━━━━━┻━━━━━━┫
┃          ┃ З Ѕ │ Х   │ Ц   │ В   │ Б   │ К   │ М   │ ;   │ :   │ ?   ┃                ┃
┃  Shift ⇧ ┃ з ѕ │ х   │ ц   │ в   │ б   │ к   │ м   │ , < │ . > │ /   ┃     Shift ⇧    ┃
┣━━━━━━━┳━━┻━━━━┳┷━━━━━┷┱────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴┲━━━━┷━━┳━━┻━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━┛
┃       ┃       ┃       ┃                                   ┃       ┃       ┃       ┃
┃ Ctrl  ┃ Meta  ┃  Alt  ┃                Space              ┃AltGr ⇮┃ Menu  ┃ Ctrl  ┃
┗━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┹───────────────────────────────────┺━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┛

I do think the ability to switch between alphabets quickly should be a function of the input method, not of the layout itself.  No standard Russian, Greek, Armenian etc layouts have Latin letters, although their users all have the same need for them.  So I think it's improper to build this specifically into Rulemak as an exception.

I now use the Menu key as Mode_switch to accomplish the same: this key switches layouts only while it is pressed.  Thus gaining back an entire third and fourth layout layer for extra Cyrillic letters, in the spirit of Colemak's very broad multilingual support for the Latin script, without the intention of being optimal for all these languages at the same time.

Yes, the South Slavic languages are further away from Russian, but the East Slavic languages are quite closely related, and will have a relatively useful layout with this.

Even though many of the extra Cyrillic letters have overlapping/conflicting roles, I'm quite satisfied with the proposed mapping.  I even have good spots in mind for the "recent" historic letters (ѣ, ѵ, ѳ on я, ж, ф), but I doubt they are of any use beyond academics, so I won't overload the layout with them.

Only the accented letters are still bothering me – give them a dedicated AltGr mapping or leave them as dead key combinations only?  There are technical difficulties here as well:  Montenegrin з́́ and с́ are not encoded as precomposed characters in Unicode, so they can not be implemented in xkb layouts (only single Unicode characters can be), but they are missing in X11 dead key / Compose definitions as well.  So I'm currently putting Unicode combining characters into the layout, instead of dead keys, but they have to be typed after the letter instead of before.

Even the most "recent" historic letters appear to be really useless now.  In fact, they were already obsolete by the time they were officially dropped 100 years ago.

So I considered adding support for extra, non-Slavic alphabets instead, but it's very difficult to map all those additional, often similar/conflicting, letters consistently.  Also, the non-Slavic alphabets reuse very little letters of the Slavic ones discussed above, but instead uses many different letters for the same or similar phonemes.  The only "useful" combination I could come up with was with Kazakh (extra letters ә, ғ, қ, ң, һ, ө, ү, ұ, і), but it's already a stretch.

A more elegant solution would be to have two separate international Rulemak extensions: one for the Slavic languages as discussed above, and another for non-Slavic languages.  This leads to more consisent AltGr mappings, eg. for all the "tailed" letters, which cannot be formed through combining sequences: җ ӆ ҭ ң қ ӎ etc.  But I'm not literate in any of these languages, so I won't be actually implementing this, I just leave the suggested mappings below.

The basic Slavic extension will be my "official" Rulemak implementation from now on.
(Note: only AltGr keys changing, the standard Russian letter layout stays the same.)

Rulemak + Slavic: Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian
[XKB] [PKL]

┌─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┲━━━━━━━━━┓
│ Ё ``│ ! ˝ │ @   │ №   │ $   │ %   │ ^ ¯ │ &   │ * ₴ │ (   │ )   │ _ — │ Ъ + ┃ ⌫       ┃
│ ё ` │ 1 ´ │ 2 ¨ │ 3 # │ 4 ¢ │ 5 € │ 6 ˘ │ 7   │ 8 ₽ │ 9 [ │ 0 ] │ - – │ ъ = ┃Backspace┃
┢━━━━━┷━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┺━┳━━━━━━━┫
┃       ┃ Я   │ Ж   │ Ф   │ П   │ Г Ґ │ й Ј │ Л Љ │ У Ў │ Ы Ї │ Ю : │ Ш { │ Щ } ┃ Enter ┃
┃ Tab ↹ ┃ я   │ ж   │ ф   │ п   │ г ґ │ й ј │ л љ │ у ў │ ы ї │ ю ; │ ш « │ щ » ┃   ⏎   ┃
┣━━━━━━━┻┱────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┺┓      ┃
┃ ⌫ Back ┃ А   │ Р   │ С   │ Т Ћ │ Д Ђ │ Ч Џ │ Н Њ │ Е Є │ И І │ О   │ Ь " │ Э | ┃      ┃
┃  space ┃ а   │ р   │ с   │ т ћ │ д ђ │ ч џ │ н њ │ е є │ и і │ о   │ ь ' │ э \ ┃      ┃
┣━━━━━━━━┻━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┲━━━┷━━━━━┻━━━━━━┫
┃          ┃ З Ѕ │ Х   │ Ц   │ В Ќ │ Б Ѓ │ К   │ М   │ ;   │ :   │ ?   ┃                ┃
┃  Shift ⇧ ┃ з ѕ │ х   │ ц   │ в ќ │ б ѓ │ к   │ м   │ , < │ . > │ /   ┃     Shift ⇧    ┃
┣━━━━━━━┳━━┻━━━━┳┷━━━━━┷┱────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴┲━━━━┷━━┳━━┻━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━┛
┃       ┃       ┃       ┃                                   ┃       ┃       ┃       ┃
┃ Ctrl  ┃ Meta  ┃  Alt  ┃                Space              ┃AltGr ⇮┃ Menu  ┃ Ctrl  ┃
┗━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┹───────────────────────────────────┺━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┛

Rulemak + Slavic + Kazakh + historical

┌─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┲━━━━━━━━━┓
│ Ё ``│ ! ˝ │ @   │ №   │ $   │ %   │ ^ ¯ │ & Ӏ │ * ₴ │ ( Ү │ ) Ұ │ _ — │ Ъ + ┃ ⌫       ┃
│ ё ` │ 1 ´ │ 2 ¨ │ 3 # │ 4 ¢ │ 5 € │ 6 ˘ │ 7 ӏ │ 8 ₽ │ 9 ү │ 0 ұ │ - – │ ъ = ┃Backspace┃
┢━━━━━┷━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┺━┳━━━━━━━┫
┃       ┃ Я Ѣ │ Ж Ѵ │ Ф Ѳ │ П Ғ │ Г Ґ │ й Ј │ Л Љ │ У Ў │ Ы Ї │ Ю : │ Ш { │ Щ } ┃ Enter ┃
┃ Tab ↹ ┃ я ѣ │ ж ѵ │ ф ѳ │ п ғ │ г ґ │ й ј │ л љ │ у ў │ ы ї │ ю ; │ ш « │ щ » ┃   ⏎   ┃
┣━━━━━━━┻┱────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┺┓      ┃
┃ ⌫ Back ┃ А Ә │ Р   │ С   │ Т Ћ │ Д Ђ │ Ч Џ │ Н Њ │ Е Є │ И І │ О Ө │ Ь " │ Э | ┃      ┃
┃  space ┃ а ә │ р   │ с   │ т ћ │ д ђ │ ч џ │ н њ │ е є │ и і │ о ө │ ь ' │ э \ ┃      ┃
┣━━━━━━━━┻━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┲━━━┷━━━━━┻━━━━━━┫
┃          ┃ З Ѕ │ Х Һ │ Ц   │ В Ќ │ Б Ѓ │ К Қ │ М Ң │ ;   │ :   │ ?   ┃                ┃
┃  Shift ⇧ ┃ з ѕ │ х һ │ ц   │ в ќ │ б ѓ │ к қ │ м ң │ , < │ . > │ /   ┃     Shift ⇧    ┃
┣━━━━━━━┳━━┻━━━━┳┷━━━━━┷┱────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴┲━━━━┷━━┳━━┻━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━┛
┃       ┃       ┃       ┃                                   ┃       ┃       ┃       ┃
┃ Ctrl  ┃ Meta  ┃  Alt  ┃                Space              ┃AltGr ⇮┃ Menu  ┃ Ctrl  ┃
┗━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┹───────────────────────────────────┺━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┛

Rulemak + generic non-Slavic: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Uzbek, Mongolian, Ossetian, Tajik, Dungan, ...
(all merely accented letters are left to compose combinations.)

┌─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┬─────┲━━━━━━━━━┓
│ Ё ``│ ! ˝ │ @   │ №   │ $   │ %   │ ^ ¯ │ & Ӏ │ * ¤ │ ( Ұ │ ) ] │ _ — │ Ъ + ┃ ⌫       ┃
│ ё ` │ 1 ´ │ 2 ¨ │ 3 # │ 4 ¢ │ 5 € │ 6 ˘ │ 7 ӏ │ 8 ₽ │ 9 ұ │ 0 [ │ - – │ ъ = ┃Backspace┃
┢━━━━━┷━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┺━┳━━━━━━━┫
┃       ┃ Я Ӕ │ Ж Җ │ Ф   │ П Ҕ │ Г ғ │ й Ј │ Л Ӆ │ У Ү │ Ы Ҩ │ Ю : │ Ш { │ Щ } ┃ Enter ┃
┃ Tab ↹ ┃ я ӕ │ ж җ │ ф   │ п ҕ │ г Ғ │ й ј │ л ӆ │ у ү │ ы ҩ │ ю ; │ ш « │ щ » ┃   ⏎   ┃
┣━━━━━━━┻┱────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┴┬────┺┓      ┃
┃ ⌫ Back ┃ А Ә │ Р Ҏ │ С Ҫ │ Т Ҭ │ Д Џ │ Ч Ҷ │ Н Ң │ Е Є │ И І │ О Ө │ Ь " │ Э | ┃      ┃
┃  space ┃ а ә │ р ҏ │ с ҫ │ т ҭ │ д џ │ ч ҷ │ н ң │ е є │ и і │ о ө │ ь ' │ э \ ┃      ┃
┣━━━━━━━━┻━┱───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┬───┴─┲━━━┷━━━━━┻━━━━━━┫
┃          ┃ З Ӡ │ Х Ҳ │ Ц Ҵ │ В Һ │ Б Ҟ │ К Қ │ М Ӎ │ ;   │ :   │ ?   ┃                ┃
┃  Shift ⇧ ┃ з ӡ │ х ҳ │ ц ҵ │ в һ │ б ҟ │ к қ │ м ӎ │ , < │ . > │ /   ┃     Shift ⇧    ┃
┣━━━━━━━┳━━┻━━━━┳┷━━━━━┷┱────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴─────┴┲━━━━┷━━┳━━┻━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━┛
┃       ┃       ┃       ┃                                   ┃       ┃       ┃       ┃
┃ Ctrl  ┃ Meta  ┃  Alt  ┃                Space              ┃AltGr ⇮┃ Menu  ┃ Ctrl  ┃
┗━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┹───────────────────────────────────┺━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━┛

I was already using AltGr+Shift for related accent pairs (grave/double grave, acute/double acute, breve/macron), but X11 actually has a nicer solution: the dead key applied to itself results in the corresponding combining character.  This means equivalent options are: <dead_acute> <letter> = <letter> <dead_acute> <dead_acute> = <letter> <combining_acute>.  So the XKB layout uses proper dead keys now, which can directly or indirectly form all needed combinations.  For PKL the dead key combinations have to be completely mapped in the layout itself, this is still to-do.

One exception may be Church Slavonic, not sure how relevant this still is.  But I'm currently quite happy with the limited "contemporary Slavic languages" layout.  Acamedic/scholar users of archaic alphabets are not a target audience for Rulemak ;-) and quite surely know how to modify keyboard layouts for themselves.

Since PKL deadkeys are just a mapping of arbitrary Unicode codepoints, it's possible to map something to the "naked" combining character.  Just not the deadkey itself though (like XKB), since it's not a character on its own.  Anyway, with PKL we can define the dead key combinations in the layout, and do not depend on the system wide ones as with XKB, so we should not need the separate combining characters (except for Montenegrin з́ and с́, as these have no precomposed form and can only be constructed with combining characters – but it seems no native Cyrillic layout supports them, only in the equivalent Latin script).

Since Rulemak has been moved to base.extras.lst, users of some Linux DEs (e.g. Xfce) will probably still have to add it using Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks or manually.

I was simply trying to warn people, since the extra layouts not being listed by localectl either is confusing.

Hi protocactus, and thanks for your insights on the Rulemak AltGr layout.  I too have spent quite some time trying to come up with a layout with "broad" Slavic and non-Slavic Cyrillic alphabet support, but found it very difficult given the enormous variety of extra letters – often visually and functionally similar to each other, yet unique to just one or a few languages.  Clearly the Soviet linguists that designed this letter soup did not have future digitalization in mind, or they would have stuck to a basic set of letters with standard(ized) diacritics, I hope. :-)

Failing to find a good compromise, I narrowed it down to the Slavic languages, specifically the letters present in Windows-1251, as these are also the only ones with universally "guaranteed" font support (see WGL-4).  This became my official Rulemak AltGr layout presented above (first variant), and I'm still quite happy with it.  Later on I added palochka (on AltGr+/) and the pre-reform Russian letters ѣ, ѳ, ѵ, but anything beyond that requires compromises on supported languages and logical letter placement.

So I stopped there and switched to designing a set of X11 Compose key sequences to enter all the extra letters, with the bonus that this would benefit users of *any* Cyrillic keyboard layout (in Linux), not just Rulemak.  But this is still a work in progress.

Out of curiosity: which of the Cyrillic script languages do you understand? (natively?)
And do you know of any other universal Cyrillic keyboard design efforts?  I found this this Russian-Ukrainian-Belorusian layout (included with Linux xkeyboard-layouts), and some Church Slavonic extensions, but nothing with a wider scope.

I'm going to resurrect this topic to propose a general non-Slavic Cyrillic AltGr layer that covers as many major languages as possible without getting too cluttered.

Adyghe, Avar, Buryat, Chechen, Dargin, Ingush, Kabardian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lezgian, Mongolian, Tajik, Tatar, Turkmen, Uzbek

- җ - - ғ - ӯ ұ ӣ ү
 ә - - ӏ - - ң ё і ө
  - ҳ һ - - қ -

I understand that it's not as comprehensive as some of the layouts posted previously on this thread, but I think separate Slavic and non-Slavic layouts are probably better than trying to squeeze in as many letters as possible at the expense of typographical characters.

Interesting. Do you have a diagram of your layout? And did you use any of the variants with extra kyrillic glyphs, or the old standard with latin letters on AltGr?