Switching to Spare Keyboard Layouts

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Hello,

I imagine you have a lot of newbies and from-Windows newcomers to this discussion area, and I tried doing my due diligence in the WorldWideWebs, but I have not been able to find a solution to my issue. (Fair warning: I have a few issues with my system, but I am hoping this is an easy, soft start into Fedora Discussion).

I have a Dell XPS 13, and recently changed from Windows 10 to Fedora 42 (KDE). I am a linguist, and I also communicate in many languages throughout the day, so on Windows, I used to use SIL’s Keyman app, but I found that this isn’t easily available on Linux.

I was sad at first, but then I was overjoyed to find that F42 comes with an IPA Keyboard layout out-of-the-box! Finally, somebody thinks flexibility in keyboard layouts important enough to include every possible permutation of layouts into the OS! Go Linux, go Fedora, yay!

Now here is where my problem begins, though:
I am notified by my system that I can only have a maximum of 4 layouts through which I can cycle with the shortcut. This would be cumbersome (I use at least 6 layouts daily), but the Keyboard section in the System Settings says the following:

You can have up to 4 main layouts, all other layouts are spare. Spare layouts are not included when cycling through the layouts, but can be accessed through the keyboard indicator applet or by setting a custom shortcut.

I have selected my keyboards, I have set my custom shortcuts. I can cycle through the four main keyboard layouts that I have chosen, and I can access them through the shortcuts I set. But any layout that is not part of the main 4 that I choose with the Ranked List in System Settings/Keyboard is not accessible to me at all by the custom shortcuts I have set.

When I middle-click the keyboard indicator applet (I am guessing the icon on the bottom right with the language code is what that refers to), I see only the four main layouts in the list, followed by .

Is there anything I can do to enable this? Thanks in advance for anyone’s expertise!

EDIT: I forgot to add that I tried changing around the rankings to make spare keyboard layouts into main keyboard layouts, and when I do that, the shortcuts work for whichever 4 layouts are chosen as main. So the issue is not with the shortcuts themselves.

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Looks like this is a known bug in Plasma: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455431

No clear expectation of when it will be fixed, unfortunately.

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Welcome to Fedora! We don’t have that many previous MS users here really … so glad to have you :slight_smile:

The key shortcut issue sounds like it is a limitation of KDE, rather than strictly speaking Fedora. There forums area at https://discuss.kde.org/ though maybe someone here can offer more help than I can.

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A three year old bug!

We might have to find a workaround.

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Oh lord, it was even commented on by another fellow linguist on the Bug Tracker. I am slightly ashamed of my research capabilities, but thank you both for the swift replies! :smile: I certainly would not mind some workaround being introduced, because having to switch around keyboard ranks is genuinely… annoying.

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My off the cuff suggestion would be that if you are not tied to KDE, then Gnome (Workstation) might offer you the options you need.
To test that you can boot from a Live USB - no need to install yet. Sorry I can’t test that for you as I am on a little used Windows Manager (Sway) that is great but may be a little difficult to use.

We do have a lot of Gnome users though so one may pipe in.

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On Sway, according to Reddit - The heart of the internet it looks like you could change to as many layouts as you like with a console command with

Open the terminal and run sway

Hit SUPER(Windows Key)+ENTER to open the Sway terminal

Type sway input type:keyboard xkb_layout <country code> (Country code like: uk, us, de)

I wonder if there is a console command that will do this in KDE?

Also for Sway, the manual shows how to make shortcuts to change layout.

There is also iBus, which may be configured for various desktops WaylandDesktop · ibus/ibus Wiki · GitHub

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I’m sorry this is not working on KDE as expected.

FWIW, on GNOME, the keyboard shortcut (Super+Space) to switch between keyboard layouts is working for at least 6 input sources.

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Hi Sally,

i’m wondering if this limitation - up to 4 layouts in the cycle - is intentional constraint for better usability?

For example, I usually use 3 or 4 layouts (for English, Spanish and Russian), and most multilingual workflows usually require switching only between a certain language pair (ie. english/spanish, etc). Initially i tried cycling though them but that turned out to be waste of time, sometimes you miss the right language and have to go for another round again…) I imagine cycling through 6 layouts will be even worse.

Did you notice that you can assign precise hotkey combinations for each layout?

for example, you could try Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 (Alt-F1…n won’t do as they are assigned to terminals).

You can easily switch between them with 1 hand during touch typing and it will be way faster as they jump to the right layout instantly, linux style.

hope this helps.