libxkbcommon

xkbcommon is a keymap compiler and support library which processes a reduced subset of keymaps as defined by the XKB specification. Primarily, a keymap is created from a set of Rules/Model/Layout/Variant/Options names, processed through an XKB ruleset, and compiled into a struct xkb_keymap, which is the base type for all xkbcommon operations.

From an xkb_keymap, an xkb_state object is created which holds the current state of all modifiers, groups, LEDs, etc, relating to that keymap. All key events must be fed into the xkb_state object using xkb_state_update_key(). Once this is done, the xkb_state object will be properly updated, and the keysyms to use can be obtained with xkb_state_key_get_syms().

Quick Guide

See Quick Guide.

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:

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

Relation to X11

See Compatibility notes.

Development

An extremely rudimentary homepage can be found at

http://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>

Bugs are also welcome, and may be reported either at

Bugzilla https://bugs.freedesktop.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=libxkbcommon

or

Github https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/issues

The maintainers are

• Daniel Stone daniel@fooishbar.org
• Ran Benita ran234@gmail.com

Credits

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