Title: Keyboard setup for OpenBSD
Author: Alexander Arkhipov <aa@manpager.org>
Created: 2023-11-06
Modified: 2024-03-23

Ever since I installed Unix for the first time I've been on a
constant quest to configure my keyboard as I wanted it, namely:

- set up the Dvorak layout;
- make super/menu/whatever useless bottom keys additional
  alts/controls;
- make caps an additional escape;
- make the extra ISO key do something useful;
- switch between English and Russian on scroll lock;

Well, I'd still like to get a better board one day, but at least I
now have the software where I want it to be, and there is no xmodmap
trickery! I also managed to configure it like that on the TTY, but
that's OpenBSD-specific, and on different systems you'll have to
configure the TTY differently. Sorry!


COMPOSE

Have you ever wondered how do you input all those weird post-Romance
letters like ö, ç and ñ? Or fancy unicode characters like ° (as in
°C)? For a long time my method has been to simply copy-paste them
from somewhere. Then I discovered the "compose" key: you press
"compose", and two or more other keys in sequence, and get just some
such characters. For instance:

compose + ` + e = è

The precice table of compose sequences will depend on the program.
For instance there are such tables for X11, the TTY, and, for
whatever reason, GTK. For X11 at least you can look them up in a path
like /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose. The initial
part of this path will differ between systems, but I am sure you'll
find something if you just type `find / -name Compose 2>/dev/null'.

This is the perfect keysym to put on the extra ISO key.


X11

First type `man xkeyboard-config setxkbmap'. xkeyboard-config(7) is
rather badly formatted, so you may have to expand your xterm a bit.

Well, it's pretty simple beyond that, just use the options you need,
for instance:

setxkbmap -option # reset options
setxkbmap -layout 'us(dvorak),ru' \
    -option grp:sclk_toggle \
    -option grp_led:scroll \
    -option caps:escape
    -option altwin:alt_win \
    -option ctrl:menu_rctrl \
    -option terminate:ctrl_alt_cksp \
    -option compose:102

In my particular case, the usual layout-switching via the grp:*
option seems to work poorly for some reason, so I use the [xrus]
program. It says it's for Russian-English switching specifically,
but I think it should work with other languages as well.


TTY (OpenBSD)

The definitions are in the file /usr/include/dev/wscons/wsksymdef.h.
And the manuals are wsconsctl(8) and wsconsctl.conf(5). For instance,
here's what I have in /etc/wsconsctl.conf:

keyboard1.encoding=us.dvorak
keyboard1.map+='keycode 100 = Multi_key'
keyboard1.map+='keysym Caps_Lock = Escape'
keyboard1.map+='keysym Menu = Control_R'
keyboard1.map+='keysym Meta_L = Alt_L'
keyboard1.map+='keysym Meta_R = Alt_R'


[xrus] http://lav.yar.ru/download/xruskb/