Wombo Combo will be a keyboard GUI configuration tool for the Linux XKB system.

It saves its output to the ~/config/xkb/ folder, allowing configuration without messing with system files. These local configurations are compatible with (libxkbcommon)[https://xkbcommon.org/], which means it won't work on X systems, but only when running Wayland.

I'm currently exploring the XKB possibilities and limitations. This is pre-aplha software, don't use it.

I'd like Wombo Combo to have instant preview of its changes. I could open an evdev device directly, but that requires root access. For now I'll require to change the specific device permissions. Maybe a PolKit policy would allow us to open that device.

Some code to parse xkb files: https://github.com/divvun/xkb-parser

/usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h contains the keysym definitions. Unicode characters don't need one.

/usr/share/X11/xkb/ contain default components configurations: compat/geometry/keycodes/rules/symbols/types Each component can contain multiple variants, defined by [default] xkb_keycodes "<name" { ... } They can be included with xfree86(pc102) See: https://www.charvolant.org/doug/xkb/html/node4.html +overrides, /augments the symbols defined in it. Eg. us(pc101)+ctrl(swapcaps).

This compiles the current active configuration: xkbcomp $DISPLAY output.xkb

Xkb options can be enabled in gnome with:

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options "['caps:ctrl_modifier', 'lv3:ralt_switch', 'custom:foo']"

When we'll do this directly in the application, we'll require DConf access. With Flatpak we'll need to add:

--filesystem=xdg-run/dconf
--filesystem=~/.config/dconf:ro
--talk-name=ca.desrt.dconf
--env=DCONF_USER_CONFIG_DIR=.config/dconf

~/.config/xkb/rules/evdev ~/.config/xkb/rules/evdev.xml ~/.config/xkb/symbols/custom