Xorg: Using the US International (altgr-intl variant) Keyboard Layout

TL;DR: If you want to sanely type French, German, Spanish, or other European languages on a standard US keyboard (101 or 104 keys), your only real option is the us layout with the (relatively new) altgr-intl variant.

I like to type in French and German sometimes because I study these languages for fun. For some time, I had used the fr and de X keyboard layouts to input special characters from these languages. However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how most European layouts, such as fr and de, require that you have a 105-key keyboard. A 105-key keyboard looks exactly like the standard, full-sized IBM-style 104-key keyboard (i.e., IBM Model “M” 101-key keyboard plus 2 Windows keys and 1 “Menu entry” key on the bottom row), except that it has 1 more extra key on the row where the Shift keys are (and also has a “tall” Enter key with some of the existing keys on the right side rearranged a bit).

I personally use a 104-key keyboard (a Unicomp Space Saver 104, because that’s how I roll). Now, when I switched to the fr layout the other day, I wanted to type the word âme. Unfortunately, the circumflex dead key was not where it was supposed to be. This was because I only had 104 keys instead of 105, and during the process of switching forcibly to the fr layout, there was a malfunction in the conversion (rightfully so).

Now, the choice was to either buy a 105-key keyboard or just find an alternative 104-key layout that had dead keys. I didn’t want to buy a new 105-key keyboard because (1) the extra 1 key results in a squished, “square” looking left-Shift key and (2) the tall Enter key would make it more difficult for me to keep my fingers happy on the home row, since I’d have to stretch my pinky quite a bit to reach it, and (3) I just didn’t feel like spending another ~$100 for a keyboard (my Unicomp is still in excellent condition!).

So, I had to find a new keyboard layout that could process accented/non-English Latin characters better. The Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard layout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Canadian_Multilingual_Standard) looked very, very cool, but it was only for a 105-key keyboard. I then discovered a layout called the US International Standard keyboard layout, which enables you to type all the cool accented letters from French or German (and other European languages) while still retaining a QWERTY, 101/104 key design. This sounded great, until I realized that the tilde (~), backtick (`), single quote (‘) and other keys were dead keys. I.e., to type ‘~’ in this layout, you have to type ‘~’ followed by a space. This is horrible for programmers in Linux because the ~ key comes up everywhere (it’s a shell shortcut for the $HOME directory). To type a single quote character, you have to type (‘) followed by a space! Ugh. I’m sorry, but whoever designed this layout was obviously a European non-programmer who wanted to type English easier.

But then, all hope was not lost. When browsing all of the choices for the us keyboard layout variant under X (/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst), I found a curious variant called altgr-intl. A quick google search turned up this page, an email from the creator of this layout to the X developers: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2007-July/026534.html. Here was a person whose desired usage fit perfectly with my own needs! Here’s a quote:

I regularly write four languages (Dutch, English, French and German)
on a US keyboard (Model M – © IBM 1984).

I dislike the International keyboard layout. Why do I have to press
two keys for a single quote (‘ followed the spacebar) just because the
‘ key is a dead-key that enables me to type an eacute (é)?

I decided to ‘hide’ the dead-keys behind AltGr (the right Alt key).
AltGr+’ followed by e gives me eacute (é). It also gives me
m² (AltGr+2).

Excellent! Apparently, this layout was so useful that it became included eventually into the upstream X codebase, as the altgr-intl variant for the standard us (QWERTY) keyboard layout. The most compelling feature of this layout is that all of the non-US keys are all hidden behind a single key: the right Alt key. If you don’t use the right Alt key, this layout behaves exactly the same as the regular plain us layout. How cool is that?! And what’s more, this layout makes it compatible with the standard 101-key or 104-key IBM-styled keyboards!

This variant deserves much more attention. Unfortunately, there seems to be little or no information about it other than the above-quoted email message. Also, I’ve noticed that it is capable of generating Norse characters as well, like þ and ø. There does not seem to be a simple keyboard layout picture on the internet to show all the keys. Anyway, I’ve been using it recently and it really does work great. There is no need for me to switch between the us, fr, and de layouts to get what I want. I just use this layout and that’s it. Take that, Canadian Multilingual Standard!

Here’s how to set it up: use either the setxkbmap program like this:

setxkbmap -rules evdev -model evdev -layout us -variant altgr-intl

in a script called by ~/.xinitrc, or use it directly in your keyboard xorg settings:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Keyboard Defaults"
    MatchIsKeyboard "yes"
    Option  "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option  "XkbVariant" "altgr-intl"
EndSection

I personally prefer the script method because you can tweak it easily and reload it without restarting X. For me, I had to use the -rules evdev -model evdev options because -model pc104 would mess things up (probably due to an interaction with xmodmap and such in my ~/.xinitrc). Whatever you do, make sure everything works by testing out the AltGr (right Alt) key. For example, AltGr+a should result in ‘á’.

A couple caveats: Some keys like â and è (which are AltGr+6+a and AltGr+`+e (i.e., uses dead keys)) do not show up at all on urxvt. I’m guessing that the dead keys are broken for urxvt (or maybe it’s a bug with this layout; who knows). Luckily, I can just use a non-console app (like GVIM) to do my Euro-language typing, so it’s OK (although, eventually, I’ll run into this bug again when I start typing French emails from within mutt inside urxvt 20 years later… but by then it will be fixed, I’m sure.) Also, the nifty xkbprint utility can generate nice pictures of keyboard layouts (just do a google image search on it), but it’s currently missing (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17541) from Arch Linux’s xorg-xkb-utils package. So, if you’re on Arch, you’ll have to experiment a bit to figure out the various AltGr+, and AltGr+Shift+ key combinations.

See also: Xorg: Switching Keyboard Layouts Consistenly and Reliably from Userspace

UPDATES:

• October 30, 2011: I just found out that the dead keys bug in urxvt is actually a bug in ibus/SCIM (I use ibus, which relies on SCIM, to enter Japanese/Korean characters when I need to). I tried out uim, which is a bit more complicated (much less user friendly, although there are no technical defects, from what I can tell), and with uim, the dead keys work properly in urxvt. The actual bug report for ibus is here.
  So, use uim if you want to use the altgr-intl layout flawlessly, while still retaining CJK input functionality. Of course, if you never needed CJK input methods in the first place, this paragraph shouldn’t concern you at all.
• December 7, 2011: Fix typo.
• January 24, 2012: Fix grammar.