Dvorak-Qwerty keyboard shortcuts with Yakuake and Tilda (and Konsole)

I just set up Manjaro KDE Plasma 20. It has so many thoughtful checkboxes that I’ve always wanted my computer to have!

I use a Dvorak-Qwerty keyboard layout that uses Dvorak for typing, and Qwerty for all keyboard shortcuts. This layout works great, with the one catch that you must put Caps Lock on all the time to access Dvorak. I set this layout in Manjaro system settings.

I like Yakuake, but it does not respect this keyboard layout. It lets me type in Dvorak but also seems to keep keyboard shortcuts in Dvorak. And keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to work—neither Ctrl-C nor Ctrl-I (Ctrl-C in Dvorak) work to kill a terminal program. Without this shortcut, I have to use the mouse to kill the whole terminal to end a running program.

The same thing happens in Konsole, so it might be an underlying Konsole issue, or just how keyboard layouts work in Linux.

I tried Tilda to just bypass the problem, and Tilda respects the system keyboard layout which is great. However the problem with Tilda is that I can’t get it to open consistently with F12. If I set a Global Shortcut to F12 to _launch Tilda, it sometimes works once. In Tilda’s settings, it won’t even let me set F12 to “Pull Down Terminal”.

The deeper issue here is maybe how Linux does keyboard layouts? I think there are two or three ways that normally coexist on the same system. I don’t know enough to know how to edit the keyboard layout files, or whether it’s even possible to (for example) make the Dvorak-Qwerty keyboard layout work without Caps Lock being on all the time.

Can anyone help me solve this? If I could solve any of these three problems I would be set with Manjaro: Yakuake not respecting the system keyboard layout, Tilda not opening consistently with F12, and not being able to fully edit and comprehend how Linux is doing its keyboard shortcuts and layouts. Global Shortcuts is great but is not working consistently with Tilda.

Thanks for reading.

Installed quake and it works! Both F12 and my keyboard layout work correctly. Still interested in better solutions to this Dvorak-Qwerty layout if anyone knows of one.