How custom my keyboard layout?

Question

I use the US International Layout on my keyboard.

I'm very satisfied without for one point.

By defaut, the apostroph touch use this character ´ instead of '.

I need to push alt+´ for obtain '. I want switch this.

It is the same problem with double apostroph, by default I have ¨ instead of ".

This is a screenshoot of my keyboard layout with the key surrounded in red:

My layout keyboard

I try to change my Compose file in usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose but after a reboot it does not work.

I want a permanent changement, so I prefer to avoid to charge a .Xmodmap file, it is long to charge.

Answer 1

I don't understand what you mean by ".Xmodmap is long to charge". I've customized my keyboard using .Xmodmap and I load it during X session start (how to do that depends on which display manager you use), that was neither difficult to do nor long.

Also, you can easily experiment to find out what lines .Xmodmap should contain. So that would be my recommended way.

IIRC, X11 gets the keyboard layout from the kernel keyboard layout, which is set up using files in /usr/share/keymaps. It can be dynamically examined and changed with dumpkeys and loadkeys. You can also force X11 to load a keyboard layout, but you need to create an xorg.conf file for that. The keyboard definition files both for X11 and the kernel are sufficiently complicated that I wouldn't want to change any of them permanently (and the changes will revert as soon as you update the corresponding package), so you'd have to find out how to create your own layout. Unless you can find an existing layout for the US keyboard that already suits your needs.

All of this is much more difficult than just creating an .Xmodmap file.