US keyboard with Swedish soft layout

Recently I have started to code more than usual and finally gave in to the trend and got myself a mechanical keyboard. It ended up being a Royal Kludge 71 (budget version of Calibur V2 TE RGB perhaps?), a mechanical Bluetooth 71% keyboard. All’n’all, pretty good stuff for a good price but there were some issues, a topic that might deserve a post of its own.

Anywho… Thing is that the layout is ANSI-INCITS, while in it is more common in Europe to use the ISO/IEC layout. But it is just the annotation on the keys, right? No big deal, just don’t look at it… Well, that is true and for the most part it is OK. The issues arise when you use another layout than the one the physical layout is adjusted for. Especially an ISO layout on an ANSI physical keyboard. There is a key missing…

Take a look at this comparison image and compare the ANSI and the ISO. You will notice that, besides the layout difference of the keys in the Return region, the ANSI keyboard lacks a button to the left of Z. In the ISO layout this button holds the three < > | symbols which are quite nice to have if you are coding.

One natural way to solve this is of course to stick to the US keyboard layout and everything is in its place to begin with, but since I am in Sweden I am in dire need of Å Ä Ö for daily communication and also need the < > | for professional and semi-professional reasons, a key re-mapping is in order.

This tutorial is for the Linux OS, and has only been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 (Debian) and Manjaro 19 (Arch), though it is probably applicable to other Linux flavors.

Using a US keyboard with Swedish layout

In order to facilitate this in a fairly OK way I decided to remap these symbols as 3rd function on the , . - keys. Having one physical key for each symbol is a significant improvement over the original ISO standard where I never remember which of the < > is Shift- and not.

Add the custom layout

Open the following file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/se add add the following piece of code as a modification of the basic Swedish keyboard layout. Does not really matter where you place the code. At the bottom is fine.

// Swedish US_keyMod
partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "se_uskeymod" {

    include "se(basic)"

    name[Group1]="Swedish (US key-mod)";

    key <AB08> { [     comma,  semicolon, less,  dead_ogonek ] };
    key <AB09> { [    period,   colon, greater, dead_abovedot ] };
    key <AB10> { [     minus, underscore, bar, dead_abovedot ] };
};

Update rules with the new layout and name

Then locate and open /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml and locate the <variantList> of the Swedish layout. Observe the code layout and notice how the different variants are structured. Squeeze in a reference to your latest variant:

        <variant>
          <configItem>
            <name>se_uskeymod</name>
            <description>Swedish (US key-mod)</description>
          </configItem>
        </variant>

Update the layout list so that the listing is correct in GUI

Open the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst and find the line ! variant. Look within its tree structure to find Swedish layout variants. When you find them squeeze in the following line somewhere there

se_uskeymod	  se: Swedish (US key-mod)

Verify the result

Verify intended result with

$ gkbd-keyboard-display -l "se(se_uskeymod)"

final flag stands for layout(variant). The AltGr-mod of keys , . - should generate symbols < > | in text.

And finally…

Save, close, change keyboard layouts, (maybe log out, reboot or similar?… don’t remember…)

Note!

It is still unclear how to get this to work in a console-only setup like WSL2.

Optionally…

….add SWERTY layout from Johan Gustavsson. Exists for Win, Mac, Linux

ADDITION: Mac hotkeys instead of F1-F12 while in Win-keyboard option

Added 2022-08-27

If you run in to the issue of the system (most often Linux) interpreting the keyboard as a Mac keyboard even though you chose the Win configuration on the keyboard itself (Fn + a), you can modify the /sys/module/applespi/parameters/fnmode and replace the 1 with 0.

A fast option is

$ echo 0 | sudo tee -a /sys/module/applespi/parameters/fnmode

This is a temporary fix. It will revert after reboot.

A permanent solution may be:

# Add the option for the fn key
echo options applespi fnmode=2 | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/applespi.conf
# Update initramfs bootfile
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
# Reboot to test (optional)
sudo reboot