Custom XKB symbols

[dmt]

Not sure about the GUI side.

You can make a variant with just the changes, Copy the file as you suggest then you can do setxkbmap jp_en. However it needs to be run every time you boot/login (a startup app/script etc) or re-plug the keyboard (udev).

Here’s a basic example for a UK keyboard, hopefully it will help:

# /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/myxkb 
# to apply: setxkbmap myxkb  
default partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "basic" {

    include "latin"
    name[Group1]="English myxkb";

    key <AD10>  { [     p,    P,          apostrophe,          bar ] };

    include "level3(ralt_switch)"
}

I'd either do that or use `xkbcomp`.

Permanently change one key mapping in keyboard layout

That file is owned by a package so it will always be re-written when the package is updated. You can copy the file and make your changes. If you call it sk_mine then use it like this setxkbmap sk_mine. It’s temporary, see the link for making it permanent. Add to that, if the keyboard is external and is re-plugged then udev will override this, so you may need a udev rule to re-apply your custom map. Xorg/Keyboard configuration - ArchWiki udev - ArchWiki You could instead dump the current…

In that post I forgot to mention xmodmap is by far the slowest, it takes several seconds to apply the config, the others are much quicker.

EDIT: I was mostly going from memory, which is not as good as it used to be , the file to be used with that command was actually an edited copy of the original. I can’t remember if I ever knew how to use the partial file properly since I can’t get it working atm. I haven’t got time to play around with it today.

Also gnome uses wayland by default, and this will only work for X and maybe xwayland. See below.