CKBCOMP(1)

🎀 CKBCOMP(1) 🎀

Console-setup User's Manual, okay, the bible for this one 📖

✨ NAME ✨

ckbcomp — compile a XKB keyboard description to a keymap suitable for loadkeys or kbdcontrol 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ckbcomp [OPTION...] [XKBLAYOUT [XKBVARIANT [XKBOPTIONS]...]]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so the ckbcomp keymap compiler takes a description of an XKB keyboard layout and turns it into a console keymap. That console keymap can be read straight in by loadkeys(1) or kbdcontrol(1) 🦋

On its standard output, ckbcomp dumps the generated keyboard definition ✨ The biggest difference between the arguments of setxkbmap(1) and the arguments of ckbcomp is the extra parameter -charmap, which you use when you want a non-Unicode keyboard map 🫶 Without -charmap, ckbcomp makes a Unicode keyboard, so no stress 💅

🦄 OPTIONS 🦄

🌈 General options

• -?,-help — prints a usage message and exits 🙈
• -charmap charmap — the encoding to use for the output keymap. There should be a character mapping table defining this encoding in /usr/share/consoletrans. The charmaps that come pre-made are: ARMSCII-8, CP1251, CP1255, CP1256, GEORGIAN-ACADEMY, GEORGIAN-PS, IBM1133, ISIRI-3342, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-11, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, TIS-620 and VISCII 🌍
• -Idir — look in the top-level directory dir for files included by the keymap description. You can use this option multiple times 🧚 If a file can't be found in any of the directories you gave, it'll also get searched in some other standard spots, like /etc/console-setup/ckb, /usr/share/X11/xkb and /etc/X11/xkb 🔍
• -v level — sets how much detail gets listed. The level argument has to be a number from 1 to 10 📊
• -compact — generates a compact keymap with at most two xkb groups and two levels in each, or only one xkb group with up to four levels 🍓
• -freebsd — generates a keymap for FreeBSD 😈
• -backspace [bs|del] — decides how the <BackSpace> and <Delete> keys behave. The value bs gives you VT100-conformant behaviour: <BackSpace> generates ^H (ASCII BS) and <Delete> generates ^? (ASCII DEL). The value del gives you VT220-conformant behavior: <BackSpace> generates ^? (ASCII DEL) and <Delete> generates a special function sequence 💜

🎀 XKB Keyboard Description

the keyboard layout, variant and options parts can also be set directly on the command line. Check the synopsis to see how 💅

• -symbols name — sets the symbols component name of the XKB keyboard description ✨
• -keycodes name — sets the keycodes component name of the XKB keyboard description 🌸
• -rules name — the name of the rules file to use 📜
• -model name — sets the keyboard model used to choose the component names 🎹
• -layout name — sets the layout used to choose the component names 🌍
• -variant name — sets the layout variant used to choose the component names 🦋
• -option name — adds an option used to choose component names 💖

📁 FILES 📁

• /usr/share/consoletrans
• /etc/console-setup/ckb
• /usr/share/X11/xkb
• /etc/X11/xkb

⚠️ NOTES ⚠️

bestie, read this one carefully 😭 If the option -freebsd is used together with -backspace del, then the key <Delete> will generate the special code fkey70. It is your responsibility to assign the appropriate sequence to this special code by using the following command:

kbdcontrol -f 70 "`printf '\033[3~'`"

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

keyboard(5), setxkbmap(1) 🫶

Okay that's the whole tea, bestie 🌈 console-setup, 2011-03-17, CKBCOMP(1) 🦋💖✨