Show keyboard layout chart from command line

Question

I'm looking for a way to display the current keyboard layout chart from the command line.

Unfortunately xkbprint does not display utf-8 characters correctly (AFAICT).

In gnome, it is possible to click on the keyboard layout indicator applet and then "Show Layout Chart", which does the same thing as going through the menus of gnome-control-center (btw, gnome-control-center keyboard is not an acceptable solution), so there must be a way to trigger an event that would pop up this window, right?

Note that most of the time I don't use gnome-panel.

Solution

gkbd-keyboard-display -l keyboard_layout[(variant)]

For example, to show Greek keyboard layout chart from command line:

gkbd-keyboard-display -l gr

To show US AltGr International keyboard variant:

gkbd-keyboard-display -l "us(altgr-intl)"

For a complete list of layouts, see https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/impish/en/man7/xkeyboard-config.7.html#layouts

Comments

[Metaxal]

Fantastic, thanks a lot! I've been looking for this for several hours!

[Håkon Hægland]

+1 I had to install gkbd-keyboard-display from package gkbd-capplet..

[A.B.]

nice and simple :)

[Guildenstern]

The command gkbd-keyboard-display -l us,altgr-intl causes a segmentation fault for me. gkbd-keyboard-display -l "us(altgr-intl)" works, though.

[Anders]

To change layout, variant, option etc, you need to know what you can select with what. Try localectl list-x11-keymaps-models, localectl list-x11-keymaps-layouts, localectl list-x11-keymaps-variants us etc. Then use setxkbmap to test until it work as you want. Then you can use localectl set-x11-keymap ... to set it "permanently" so it work at next login. Use man pages to see more options.

[thorstorm]

Is there a way to show the currently selected input method instead?

[thorstorm]

I think I found out how: gkbd-keyboard-display -g 1