Two keyboards on one computer. When I write with A I want a US keyboard layout, when I use B I want Swedish. Possible?

Question

I have a laptop which I use an external keyboard with. When I type using the external keyboard I want to use a US keyboard layout, since that's the type of external keyboard I have. On the other hand, when I type using the integrated keyboard I'd like to use a Swedish layout.

Is this possible? And how would I go about doing it?

I'm asking here as I think we'll find most Linux expertise here.

Answer 1

First, you have to find the device ID of the keyboard to change:

$ xinput -list | grep -i key
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                     id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ LITEON Technology USB Keyboard            id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ LITEON Technology USB Keyboard            id=10   [slave  keyboard (3)]

Then change the layout using setxkbmap:

$ setxkbmap -device 9 dvorak

Some versions of setxkbmap need a '-layout' argument:

$ setxkbmap -device 9 -layout dvorak

Answer 2

Although this question is a tad old, I'd thought I'd share my solution since none of the other answers addressed how to have this work on boot.

My situation: I have a Happy Hacking Keyboard that plugs in via usb that has keys moved around (control where caps lock is, etc). I use this most of the time, but sometimes I would like to use the standard laptop keyboard or another usb keyboard. For these keyboards I created a custom keyboard layout.

The trick is that the custom keyboard layout should not be applied to the Happy Hacking Keyboard.

Solution: I created a Xorg config file as such:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-keyboard.conf 
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Happily Hacked Keyboard"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Driver "evdev"

        Option "XkbLayout" "us"
        Option "XkbVariant" "hhk"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Happy Hacking Keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        MatchVendor "Topre_Corporation"
        Driver "evdev"

        Option "XkbLayout" "us"
        Option "XkbVariant" "basic"
EndSection

The first part basically says for any standard keyboard, apply the us layout with the the custom variant. The second part says for the happy hacking keyboard, use the us layout with the basic variant.

You can match devices based on a bunch of parameters: xorg doc

Answer 3

I can positively say that what you want to do is indeed possible. I achieved the specified scenario by first

sudo cat /dev/input/event(0,1,2..)

while typing on each keyboard to ensure that they were recognized as separate devices. Then I simply applied trial-and-error, experimenting with

setxkbmap -device (1-x) us.

I discovered that setxkbmap -device 1 us configured both (all) keyboards, while setxkbmap -device 6 us only affected the secondary. Of relevance is perhaps that they both were connected via PS/2.

This of course is not guaranteed to work for you, and doesn't even classify as a proper answer, but it confirms that it's at all possible. I don't know according to which scheme the individual keyboards are named in /dev/input, but I'm sure that the names can be specified in udev, making it possible to put the appropriate setxkbmap command in /etc/rc.local or similar.

Answer 4

It might be possible, judging by the -device argument to setxkbmap:

       -device device
               Specifies the numeric device id of the input device to be
               updated with the new keyboard layout. If not specified, the
               core keyboard device of the X server is updated.

Naturally, however, I do not have a second keyboard to try it at the moment.

-A Dvorak user

Answer 5

I don't think you can do this exactly the way you want. There are two options that I know of:

1) You can make switching a simple mouse click / keystroke.

With Ubuntu / GNOME:

Mouse Click

In Ubuntu / Gnome, providing you have your input layouts setup, go to an empty spot on your panel, right click and click 'Add to Panel'. Select 'Keyboard Indicator' to add this to the panel. That should input a tiny little piece of text indicating your keyboard layout and you can click this to switch.

Keyboard shortcut

System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts -> Layout Options

There's an option there "Key(s) to change layout". You can set it to Alt+Shift, which shouldn't disturb any normal keyboard shortcuts.

I presume there is a KDE way of doing that also.

2) The other alternative is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xneur, but I am not sure if this is available for Swedish and it may not be possible for languages which have similar constructs to English.

Answer 6

I have the same situation, a laptop with a Brazilian keyboard and a German external keyboard.

My solution was to add two setxkbmap calls, but the tricky part here is to add all the layouts you need on both calls:

setxkbmap -device 12 -layout de,br
setxkbmap -device 14 -layout br,de

Device 12 is the external german keyboard whille device 14 is the laptop's brazilian keyboard.