XKB Programs

There are a number of programs which come with XKB for management and debugging purposes. These all have perfectly adequate man pages, or have a sensible -help option. I'll just mention a few things that might be useful here.

setxkbmap

This program allows an XKB map to be installed. Components can be specified either directly, with arguments such as -symbols en_US(pc104)+ru or via the rules parameters, listed in section 4.8.3.

xkbcomp

Compile an XKB keyboard description. This program converts the contents of a suitably specified set of configuration files into a form suitable for an X-server to use.

What is also interesting about this program is that it can also be used, using the -xkb option, to produce a source file for the current XKB configuration. For example, command xkbcomp :0.0 -xkb will produce a file called server-0_0.xkb which contains the complete configuration source for server 0.0.

xkbprint

Produce a graphical map of the keyboard. This is what the geometry component is used for. The map is usually a Postscript map of the keyboard, showing the keys for each character. A command such as xkbprint :0.0 will produce a file called server-0_0.ps with a map of the basic keyboard. Options such as -label type allow things such as the scan codes or key names to be printed, instead.