I´m spanish and wanna transition from windows to manjaro.
However I have a big issue with the Spanish keyboard layouts.
In Spanish we have á,é,í,ó,ú with tildes (and only these).
In the distro I see that there are a bunch of Spanish keyboards that allow for tildes (like the nodeadtilde).
However there is an issue, these keyboards also allow tildes on some consonants such as s,w,… (resulting in ś,ẃ,…).
This is very bad because I use this keyboard for both English and Spanish, meaning that I may want to write something like: “it´s time to leave”
and I won´t be able to because the tilde is being applied on a consonant.
I´ve tried fixing it myself to no avail.
(I mainly looked at the files from /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols, but activating or deactivating tildes here seemed to activate them all at once)
First of all, just to get the vernacular correct, what you are describing is not a tilde (“~”) but a diacritic.
Secondly, in the English language, we do not use a diacritic as an apostrophe — for instance in the sentence “I’ll be back” — but rather a single quote, i.e. a “'”. And as far as I know, this is also the case in other languages, such as French and Dutch, both of which are languages I speak.
Thirdly and lastly, the diacritics can be typed as standalone characters — i.e. without needing to be used in conjunction with either a vowel or a consonant — if needed, namely by typing them twice in a row, or alternatively, by typing the diacritic followed by a space character.
Good to know, in Spanish we call them tildes (maybe that’s why I had so much trouble finding anything )
For your last point, I don´t care so much that we can access ´.
My comment is not whether we can access it, but the fact that I don´t wanna be able to write ś,ẃ,ć,…, when I write ´+a consonant, the default behavior should be:
's, 'w, 'c,… (as you said the correct one in English is ’ and not )
Basically to any newcomer from windows this is annoying because it breaks your writing for no reason at all (and ś,ẃ,ć,… don´t exist either in English nor Spanish so it’s just weird).
From a technical point ´ and ’ are two different “letters”. Whereas the first one is more of a modifier of the letter/key pressed afterwards. Therefore from a technichal point the keyboard is working according it’s expected behaviour.
If I understand it correctly, you could try some locales that are not based on UTF-8 but some ISO with a limited character support that support spanish but not other languages (my speculation). I would suspect that on Windows uses some locales with less supported letters together with autocorrect lead to the behaviour you expected.
As far as I understand the spanish keyboard layout should have a separate keys for ´ and ', or am I wrong?
So the easiest solution would be to use the ’ key instead.
The Spanish dead tilde keyboard I’m using right now does indeed have separate keys for ’ and ´. The issue is that the ´ key is able to bind to consonants such as s,w and c (creating ś,ẃ and ć) (the correct behavior should be 's,'w and 'c).
In fact: ´+space=’ (in the current Spanish dead tilde keyboard) (correct functionality)
At least for the spanish no dead keys, what it does is that when I click ´, it just writes ´, without letting me bind it to a vocal (so allowing me to write á for example).
Correct behaviour which is doing now:
´+a=á
´+e=é
´+o=ó
´+u=ú
´+i=í
The rest of the cases where it uses a consonant is wrong:
´+w=ẃ
´+c=ć
´+s=ś
(and probably more consonants)
The correct behaviour in these cases should be:
´+w='w
´+c='c
´+s='s
In your opinion, but obviously not in the opinion of the people maintaining keyboard layouts for UNIX operating systems.
I have told you that you can avoid binding the diacritic to a consonant by typing the diacritic twice before typing the consonant, and that is how it’s supposed to work.
If you don’t like the way it works — perhaps because of what it’s like in Microsoft Windows; I don’t know, because I don’t use that platform — then the problem is unfortunately located between the keyboard and the chair.
GNU/Linux is not a Windows-like system; it’s a UNIX-family system, and it has nothing in common with Windows.
Well there’s a keyboard in Manjaro KDE called: Spanish (Windows).
I’d expect that one to be the same as on windows, but it has the same issue with consonants I mentioned.
In the end, this about personalization, and a lot of people that think on transitioning to Linux and are Spanish would not want to go through the hassle of changing their typing patterns when they can stay on windows.
then the problem is unfortunately located between the keyboard and the chair.
Dead keys come from typewriters and typewriters allow it’s use with any character. So it seems to be correct behaviour, despite those characters not being correct for Spanish.
This makes for a more versatile system, people can type characters from other languages and make new characters (though it doesn’t happen often).
Though for us Linux users there are a number of letters it doesn’t work with (at least for the Spanish layout). Those are:
q, t, d, h, j, x and b
You’d need to speak to the xkeyboard-config maintainers to get it changed, or to find out who you need to speak to (as it may be a lower level than the config). Though I’m not sure if they would change it or not.
They can stay on windows if they prefer, it’s their choice. If they choose to use Linux then there will be differences and they will need to adapt. Lots of us have done so, and are happy with our choice.
Only to be sure… Are you using the right keys to write the chars you want?
In Spain’s keyboard layout, the key to make an apostrophe (for example, for “it’s”) is different than the key to make an accent mark (or tilde in Spanish: áéíóú)
)
