Creating a custom Russian keyboard

[Séamas Ó Brógáin]

Customising your keyboard layout is not too difficult. It’s a text file
in which each line links the code number of the key to a particular
character. On my computer it‘s

         /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ie

The last two letters are the country code you have selected; yours will
be different.

Each line is like this:

         key <AB02> { [ x, X, VoidSymbol ], [ multiply, 0x1002297 ] };

You can have one or two “groups” (within brackets), each containing one,
two or three “levels” (separated by commas). Level 1 is the character
you get without modification, level 2 is with shift, level 3 is with a
level 3 selector key. (Not many people use this.) Group 2 is the same
but with the key usually called “alt.”

VoidSymbol is where you want no response. Alphanumeric characters are
given explicitly (like [x] and [X] above. Other characters can be
specified with a special name, where there is one (like “multiply”
above); all characters can be specified by Uniocode number prefixed by
0x100.

Don’t try to create a file from scratch (there are lots of other things
in it) but copy and modify an existing one for your chosen language.