11:21 <Guest42> Hi, man riverctl says I can specify a keyboard layout file and links to its documentation. But I cant find an understandable example or default file which I then could edit. All examples I find use magic like include commands including something not even linked from the page, but I cant find a complete file to start with. Where can I get, say, a

11:21 <Guest42> default complete US Layout file?

11:40 <leon-p> Guest42: there is a xkbcommon CLI command thing which dumps the keyboard layout spec compiled from your current settings, that may be a starting point

11:41 <leon-p> xkbcli compile-keymap

11:42 <leon-p> note that you most likely do not actually want to create your own entire keymap. including a common one and only changing specific keys is orders of magnitude less work and achieves the same thing

11:42 <leon-p> note you can overwrite keys in your keymap even if they were previously defined in one of your includes

11:43 <leon-p> back in 2021 I wrote an article about that. i've since discovered it's not entirely correct, but it should still work

11:43 <leon-p> https://leon_plickat.srht.site/writing/custom-xkb-layout/article.html

11:46 <Guest42> Thank you. I probably will settle with a simpler file that includes others eventually, sure, but a) I want to experiment and b) I want to understand the xkb topic and for that having everything visible instead of wondering wha is a consequence of includes etc is useful.

11:56 <Guest42> Just to make sure I understand correctly: Both keyboard-layout and keyboard-layout-file override prior invocations of both? To reeturn from my custom file to a builtin layout, I just do the keyboard-layout command from my init again?

11:57 <leon-p> pretty sure no one understands xkb

11:57 <leon-p> and yes

11:57 <Guest42> Ok lets say 'understand or guess enough to get to my goal' :D

11:58 <leon-p> reasonable :)

11:58 <Guest42> Thank you!

11:58 <leon-p> it's easy to change a few keymaps, but if you want harder stuff, like custom modifiers and shift levels, you'll have a far worse time, so beware

12:03 <Guest42> Is tty switching affected by xkb?

12:14 <leon-p> it's a special case

12:14 <leon-p> So Alt+Ctrl+F1 emits a special keycode, which river hard-codes to switching the TTY

12:15 <leon-p> what exactly do you want to do?

12:21 <Guest42> Nothing about Alt or Ctrl or F_, no worries. The blogpost is a useful introduction btw. It already does some of what I want (hjkl), I also want a few Unicode things, and shorten finger path to some inconveniently-reached keys (using modifiers). And then, well, some curious experimentation won't hurt : )

12:21 <Guest42> Step by step, I'll follow the blog post first (partially at least)

12:24 <Guest42> And then more complex stuff (or I will be content, dunno)

16:00 <soulseeder> I think this question went unanswered a few days ago: is there a way to know the current keyboard layout?

18:24 <ifreund> soulseeder: not yet unfortuantely

18:36 <soulseeder> ifreund: is it something that only compositor knows/can access?