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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to try Gnome, but I have a unique situation with keyboard languages that KDE addresses perfectly. If anybody has a Gnome solution, I'm all ears.

I have two keyboard languages that I use daily - switching literally every few minutes. However, I have another three languages that I use often enough to need to be able to switch to them quickly as well.

In KDE I have a hotkey (for me it's CapsLock, but it could be anything) to switch between English and LangB. Additionally, Win-1 is English, Win-2 is LangB, Win-3 is LangC, Win-4 is LangD, Win-5 is LangE. So I can get to any language easily, but I can switch between English and LangB very quickly.

Does Gnome have any way to set up something similar? I'm willing to adjust my workflow, but I need quick access to these keyboard layouts.

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I know this is not exactly what you are asking for, but are you aware of the layout called "English International with AltGr dead keys"? (lets call it EI)

If two or more of languages you switch between happen to be based on latin-script, it's quite likely your will be able to use EI instead.

I previously switched between Danish (for ÆØÅ) and English for programming, but since discovering EI I haven't had to switch at all and it's been a real pleasure.

Install gnome-tweaks, you can choose from a list of hotkey alternatives in Keyboard & Mouse | Additional Layout Options | Switching to another layout

It can cover your two main ones and pick the others from a menu.

Thank you.

  > It can cover your two main ones and pick the others from a menu.

This won't work - I need to change languages from the keyboard. In any case I hardly ever touch the mouse.

Thank you for checking, though. I'll file a feature request with Gnome and mention how KDE does it.

What I used to do in the past was simply use the Shift + Shift support provided by XKB directly. LShift+RShift went one way through a list of layouts, and RShift+LShift went the other way: for the two most used layouts, I just switched left and right, and then I could find others.

For your exact usecase, you can simply set setxkbmap to be executed on particular key presses instead (eg. "setxkbmap dk" will set a Danish layout; there are many more options and you can combine it with other things — this is basically used internally by all those layout switchers).

Thank you very much! This seems to be exactly what I need to switch to any desktop.

You can use super + space [1] to switch between langages but that won't be as fast as tour current setup with five different languages [1] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/keyboard-layo...

Yes, I would need super + space to toggle two languages and have the rest on hotkeys.

I'll file a feature request with Gnome. Thanks.

If there's a terminal command to change the layouts, you could bind those to specific hotkeys in the normal gnome settings.

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