i3blocks-keyboardlanguage-switcher
Adds a minimal block to i3blocks that shows the current keyboard layout, and allows switching keyboard layouts with a mod key combination.
I created this altered block because solutions I found online (e.g. using xkblayout-state
weren't working). For instance, the keyboard layout name for US English and US English International were both US. I wanted a more fine grained display. It's most definitely not the most elegant, nor efficient, but it has the desired effect.
It's my first bash script!
Installation
- Place the block from
.i3blocks.conf
wherever you want in your own.i3blocks.conf
config file. - Place the
bindsym
command fromconfig
into your own i3config
and take note of the mod key combination--it may override a current combination! - Create (if not already existing) a directory called
bin
in your home directory, and place language and (optionally) language-printer in there. Make them executable by running:sudo chmod +x filename
- Edit
~.bashrc
and add the following line:export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
- Log out and in and all should work.
Usage
Press mod+space
to switch between keyboard layouts as specified in the language
script. A notification will appear saying the keyboard layout changed, and the icon on the i3blocks status bar will display the currently active keyboard.
Default setup is US -> US International -> German
Files
language
: A script that switches between keyboard layouts based on what layout is currently active. Here you can add or take away layouts. To get the proper name, in the terminal switch the layout with setxkbmap
and print the output with setxkbmap -print | grep xkb_symbols | awk '{print $4}' | awk -F"+" '{print $2}'
. Use this for the string equality in the if statements.
language-printer
: Optional script that prints things nicer. Essentially the same as language
, but will just output the name of the current keyboard layout however you desire. This is what is displayed in the i3block. A cool idea would be to use fontawesome
and place flags instead of text!
.i3blocks.conf
: There are two commands:
command=setxkbmap -print | grep xkb_symbols | awk '{print $4}' | awk -F"+" '{print $2}'
command=language-printer
The first command prints the layout the same way as setxkbmap
outputs it. This is a bit ugly (in my opinion) because it outputs the layout name as, for example, us and us(intl). If this is fine, you can delete command=language-printer
and uncomment the setxkbmap
command. If this is done, you don't need to place the language-printer
script in your bin
. Otherwise, it will use the custom language-printer
script. Also, feel free to set the label for the block if you desire one.
config
: Fairly straight forward bindsym
command. Take out the notify-send
if you don't want a notification to appear when switching keyboards, change the mod key combination to whatever you desire (defaults is mod+space which overrides another default command), and change the signal if you already used 7.
Development
Feel free to edit/make better/offer suggestions. I'm open to learn!