I’m revising my Swahili-Arabic keyboard layout, and was looking for something that allows me to see what’s on each key, because it’s difficult trying to remember where everything is when you’re making revisions every 5 minutes.
I found Simos Xenitellis’ Keyboard Layout Editor here, with the code here. To install on Ubuntu 12.04, you need Java installed. The simplest way of getting Oracle (Sun) Java (I find OpenJDK still has a few issues with some applications) is to install Andrei Alin’s PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer
Next, install python-lxml and python-antlr.
Then download the KLE tarball from Github, untar it, and move into the directory. Download the ANTLR package:
wget http://antlr.org/download/antlr-3.1.2.jar and process the ANTLR grammars:
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:antlr-3.1.2.jar
java org.antlr.Tool *.g
Then launch KLE:
./KeyboardLayoutEditor
With the blog post above, the interface is quite simple to get to grips with – you just drag your desired character into the appropriate slot on the key. The “Start Character Map” button does not launch the GNOME character chooser unless you edit line 951 near the end of the file KeyboardLayoutEditor from:
os.system(Common.gucharmapapp) to
os.system(Common.gucharmappath) but the character chooser doesn’t seem to want to change fonts. So instead I opened the KDE kcharselect app manually, and dragged the characters from that.
In general, KLE is a nice app, but perhaps needs a bit of a springclean. Things that struck me were:
- You can only drag and drop the character glyph – you can’t edit it once in place on the key, you can only remove it. So you can’t, say, right-click and change 062D to 062E if you’ve made a mistake.
- Likewise, you can’t drag characters between the slots on a key to move them around – you have to remove them, and then drag them back in from scratch.
- The final file is a little untidy – it doesn’t use tabs to separate the columns of characters, or a blank line between the row-groups (AB to AE) of the keyboard.
- If you’re using the most likely course of having two modifiers (Shift and AltGr), the written file is missing the line:
include "level3(ralt_switch)"without which the AltGr options will not work. So you need to add that manually.
But all in all, Simos has written a very handy application that greatly simplifies designing a keyboard layout, so a big thank-you to him for making my work a good bit easier!
