Installing the “dvorak-grencez” custom keyboard layout

Date: 2020-10-22

Background

Sometime in October 2008 when I was just getting into fall courses at Michigan Tech, my fingers were getting tired of programming. Particularly, my right ring and pinky fingers were tired of reaching for dots, dashes, slashes, braces, brackets, quotes, etc. It’s a lot for two fingers to handle, so I decided to switch keyboard layouts. None were quite right, and I figured that if I was going to break years of muscle memory, it was probably worth striving for perfection. So I made my own layout using some guiding principles:

The Dvorak layout should have pretty optimal placement of letters and common punctuation.
The Programmer Dvorak layout probably has some good symbol locations.
Symmetry of balanced delimiters (e.g., parentheses) guarantees that they won’t use one hand more than the other.

This was the resulting “dvorak-grencez” layout (first normal, then with “Shift” held):

|---------------------------------------------------------|
| $ | & | [ | { | ( | + | = | * | ) | } | ] | ! | # |  BS |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| Tab | ; | , | . | p | y | f | g | c | r | l | / | \ | @ |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| ENTR | a | o | e | u | i | d | h | t | n | s | - | ENTR |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| SHIFT  | ' | q | j | k | x | b | m | w | v | z |  SHIFT |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| Ctl | Sup | Alt |      SPACE BAR      | Alt | Sup | Ctl |
|---------------------------------------------------------|

|---------------------------------------------------------|
| ~ | 9 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 1 | % | 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | ` |  BS |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| Tab | : | < | > | P | Y | F | G | C | R | L | ? | | | ^ |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| ENTR | A | O | E | U | I | D | H | T | N | S | _ | ENTR |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| SHIFT  | " | Q | J | K | X | B | M | W | V | Z |  SHIFT |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| Ctl | Sup | Alt |      SPACE BAR      | Alt | Sup | Ctl |
|---------------------------------------------------------|

Simple config (loadkeys and Xmodmap)

Using it has been pretty easy so far. I have a dvorak-grencez.map config for loadkeys to set the console layout and a dvorak-grencez.xmodmap config for xmodmap to set the layout when X is running. The following commands download both files (for completeness), resets the keyboard layout in X (for sanity), then uses xmodmap to swap keys around:

mkdir -p $HOME/local/opt/dvorak-grencez/
cd $HOME/local/opt/dvorak-grencez/
wget http://grencez.dev/2020/keyboard-layout-20201022/dvorak-grencez.map
wget http://grencez.dev/2020/keyboard-layout-20201022/dvorak-grencez.xmodmap
setxkbmap us
xmodmap dvorak-grencez.xmodmap
# setxkbmap us  # Reset to qwerty

I have a script called amasdf to run those last 2 commands and another script called amaoeu that runs setxkbmap us to quickly toggle back for someone else to use the keyboard.

The loadkeys config can similarly be used without installing it:

sudo loadkeys dvorak-grencez.map
# sudo loadkeys us  # This resets to qwerty.
# sudo loadkeys --default  # This resets to the system default, if you were using something else.

But this needs root permission, and I never need to swap to qwerty, so I install it as a system default. In Gentoo Linux (with OpenRC instead of systemd), this is a matter of adding a compressed config to a standard location in /usr/share/keymaps/ and then setting keymap="dvorak-grencez" in /etc/conf.d/keymaps:

gzip --keep dvorak-grencez.map
sudo install -D -m 644 dvorak-grencez.map.gz /usr/share/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak-grencez.map.gz
rm dvorak-grencez.map.gz
sudo sed -i -E -e "s/^keymap=.*/keymap=\"dvorak-grencez\"/" /etc/conf.d/keymaps

Problems with Xmodmap

The simplicity of Xmodmap is fantastic, but it doesn’t seem low-level enough in some cases. For example, after a recent update (of X?), xmodmap does not affect keyboard shortcuts of some programs (e.g., “new tab” in Chromium) until they restart. Perhaps that example has a solution, but I’d also like to set a system default instead of typing a command after rebooting or plugging in new keyboard.

Native X config (XKB)

The X keyboard extension (XKB) defines how X handles keyboard input. Running setxkbmap us is actually loading the first entry of /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us. The other subdirectories of /usr/share/X11/xkb/ have configs that feed into it, but I only care about the symbols.

Xmodmap can be loaded and dumped as an XKB config. The following commands do that, trims the config to just the xkb_symbols section, then installs the file as /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us_dvorak_grencez:

setxkbmap us  # Reset.
xmodmap dvorak-grencez.xmodmap  # Apply Xmodmap config.
xkbcomp -xkb $DISPLAY -o us_dvorak_grencez

sed -i -n -E -e "/^xkb_symbols /,/^}/p" us_dvorak_grencez
sed -i -E -e "s/^xkb_symbols \".*\"/xkb_symbols \"us_dvorak_grencez\"/" us_dvorak_grencez

sudo install -m 644 us_dvorak_grencez /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us_dvorak_grencez
rm us_dvorak_grencez

Now I can load the layout with setxkbmap:

setxkbmap us  # Reset (unnecessary).
setxkbmap us_dvorak_grencez  # Change to custom layout.
setxkbmap -query  # Get report.

The last command reports us_dvorak_grencez as the layout and pc105 as the model. Great! The system default (which takes effect after restarting X) is changed by creating a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf file containing:

Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "system-keyboard"
  MatchIsKeyboard "on"
  Option "XkbLayout" "us_dvorak_grencez"
  Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
  Option "XkbVariant" ""
  Option "XkbOptions" ""
EndSection

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