The setxkbmap command has options allowing you to switch between
layouts with a keystroke. For example, I switch between US Dvorak
("us(dvorak)" layout) and Farsi ("ir" layout) by hitting shift+esc,
showing the current layout via the scroll lock light on my keyboard.
To do this, I have this command in .xinitrc:
setxkbmap -option "" -layout "us(dvorak),ir" -option
grp:shift_caps_toggle -option grp_led:scroll :2
The -option "" at the beginning resets to defaults, and is more
defensive than actually necessary -- but it's been handy the few times
I've had to copy and paste that line from .xinitrc because I messed up
my keyboard mapping in some way.
Good luck!
~d
Quoting "G. Nikiforov"
Hello, I have a question regarding setting a shortcut for changing the keyboard layout in Xmonad. In Gnome there is a graphical utility for this and in FVWM I've done this by using the setxkbmap command in the .fvwmrc file. First using the setxkbmap command from the command line works, however one of the layouts that I'm using is Cyrillic, so once I'm in it, there's no way I can go back to a Latin keyboard layout. So I looked up the following website: http://www.xfree86.org/current/XKB-Config2.html#5 and following the advice there created a custom-kbl.conf file in the xorg.conf.d directory. However when I restarted X, all that did was make both my mouse and keyboard inoperational, so I had to reboot using LiveCD and delete the xorg.conf.d directory which I had created. Any idea what I should do? Btw, I'm using ubuntu 10.04 and had installed xmonad via the synaptic package manager. Thanks a lot in advance.