Temporarily switch Keyboard layouts in Openbox [Resolved]

Hello nabilalk

You should be able to quickly switch keyboard layouts by entering the setxkbmap xx command in your terminal. Replace xx with the 2 letter country code for the desired layout. Hope this helps.

Please allow me to add a warning here, just in case someone makes the same mistake I did
I sometimes want to practice my Greek, so I was looking for a way to quickly switch keyboard.
But typing:

ludo@ludo-desktop:~$ setxkbmap el

didn't leave me with 2 keyboards and an option to switch, it just changed it to greek!

For getting back to normal I did the following: ctrl c the word  setxkbmap and ctrl v it in the browser search.
There I could copy the words setxkbmap de and paste it in terminal - then, having Latin characters again, changed back to setxkbmap be 

ludo@ludo-desktop:~$ setxkbmap βε
Error loading new keyboard description
ludo@ludo-desktop:~$ setxkbmap de
ludo@ludo-desktop:~$ setxkbmap be

Now if anyone knows how I can switch easily between greek and belgian keyboard through shortcut keys I'd be happy

Last edited by catch22 (2009-10-31 12:17:43)

XML is a lot like HTML in that every <tag foo> needs a </tag> after it, e.g.

    <keybind key="W-1">
      <action name="Execute">
        <command>mocp --toggle-pause</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>

If the action's name is something understood internally by Openbox, the / can be at the end of the action line like thus:

    <keybind key="A-Tab">
      <action name="NextWindow"/>
    </keybind>

Hope this helps!  By the way, I <3 your sig.

Last edited by pvsage (2009-10-31 17:07:37)

have a look at this thread, 1st post:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … ang-linux/
btw, why do you want to learn Greek?

Well someone who wants to learn my native language

This is what i have changed in my rc.xml to switch between greek and english layouts

<keybind key="W-F1">
      <action name="Execute">
        <startupnotify>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
          <name>English Keyboard</name>
        </startupnotify>
        <command>setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-F2">
      <action name="Execute">
        <startupnotify>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
          <name>Greek Keyboard</name>
        </startupnotify>
        <command>setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout gr</command>
      </action>

I don't these shortcuts for desktop changing so they seemed fine , you can use any other combination ...

BTW it is cool that you want to learn Greek , it is pretty difficult though . If you need any help pm me

this is getting heavy (for me at least)...
I pasted the code in rc.xml and uncommented the older settings for W-F1 and W-F2
At reboot I got a syntax error again, this time it said "Premature end of data in tag openbox_config line 2"

NOTHING worked anymore, but after desperately banging (well, gently really ) some random keys, I managed to enter the terminal and undo the changes in /.config/openbox/rc.xml

I think I might leave it and wait and see if maybe in 9.10 there'll be a secure way of using 2 keyboard layouts.