libxkbcommon

libxkbcommon is a keyboard keymap compiler and support library which processes a reduced subset of keymaps as defined by the XKB (X Keyboard Extension) specification. It also contains a module for handling Compose and dead keys and a separate library for listing available keyboard layouts.

Quick Guide

See Introduction to XKB to learn the essentials of XKB.

See Quick Guide for an introduction on how to use this library.

Building

libxkbcommon is built with Meson:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson test -C build # Run the tests.

To build for use with Wayland, you can disable X11 support while still using the X11 keyboard configuration resource files thusly:

meson setup build \
    -Denable-x11=false \
    -Dxkb-config-root=/usr/share/X11/xkb \
    -Dx-locale-root=/usr/share/X11/locale
meson compile -C build

API

While libxkbcommon’s API is somewhat derived from the classic XKB API as found in X11/extensions/XKB.h and friends, it has been substantially reworked to expose fewer internal details to clients.

See the API Documentation.

Dataset

libxkbcommon does not distribute a keymap dataset itself, other than for testing purposes. The most common dataset is xkeyboard-config, which is used by all current distributions for their X11 XKB data. More information on xkeyboard-config is available here:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XKeyboardConfig

The dataset for Compose is distributed in libX11, as part of the X locale data.

Relation to X11

See Compatibility notes.

Development

An extremely rudimentary homepage can be found at

https://xkbcommon.org

xkbcommon is maintained in git at

https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon

Patches are always welcome, and may be sent to either

<xorg-devel@lists.x.org> or <wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>

or in a GitHub pull request.

Bug reports (and usage questions) are also welcome, and may be filed at GitHub.

The maintainers are

• Daniel Stone daniel@fooishbar.org
• Ran Benita ran@unusedvar.com

Credits

Many thanks are due to Dan Nicholson for his heroic work in getting xkbcommon off the ground initially.