Subject: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting

From: Lisi Reisz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 15:10:28 +0100

My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point 
of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign 
fonts "working", but that is another story.)  

Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of 
you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

Thanks,
Lisi

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From: Christian Seiler <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 17:21:15 +0200

> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

There's ibus and the ibus-table-translit package, so all GUI applications
that support ibus [1] will allow you to enter cyrillic characters via
typing latin equivalents. (ibus is a generic input framework originally
designed for complex scripts, such as Chinese, but now supports a lot of
things, just search for packages with ibus-table- in their name. Btw.
there's also a package for traditional Russian, if you're interested in
really old writings. For any modern Russian I would recommend just using
the aforementioned ibus-table-translit though.)

For example, typing "b" will give you a б, typing "v" will give you a в,
typing "ya" will give you a я, typing "yo" will give you a ё, and so on.

ibus is not completely trivial to setup, but it's not terribly difficult
either. It does take a bit of getting used to, but if you switch the
method back to "English", the keyboard will behave as you'd normally
expect.

Alternatively, there's something similar but as a website, called
http://translit.net/
which does the same in the Browser (Javascript required) - most Russian
people I know use that regularly.

Also, in case this is archived and people find this: for Mac OS X user
there appears to be
https://github.com/archagon/cyrillic-transliterator
which I believe does the same thing that ibus-table-translit does.
(Never tried it though.)

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Christian

[1] See https://wiki.debian.org/I18n/ibus for details. Also, ibus-setup
    is your friend.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 15:07:10 +0000 (UTC)

> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

This is what I use in my /etc/default/keyboard file:

    $ grep '^[^#]' /etc/default/keyboard
    XKBMODEL="pc101"
    XKBLAYOUT="us,ru,sy"
    XKBVARIANT=""
    XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_toggle,compose:menu"
    BACKSPACE="guess"

The "ru" portion of the XKBLAYOUT value, and the "grp:caps_toggle"
setting in XKBOPTIONS are the relevant parts for your purposes.

It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian arabic
keyboard layout.

The usual capslock function is still available via Shift+Capslock.

I'll be interested to see other responses.

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From: Christian Seiler <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 17:26:33 +0200

> It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian arabic

That's a valid way of doing this (most desktop environments allow you
to define multiple keyboard layouts + a shortcut to switch without you
having to fiddle with Xkb btw.), I personally find it really hard
though to write Cyrillic with a Russian keyboard layout, if the
characters aren't printed on the keyboard. Of course, I grew up with
the Latin layout, and I don't have any real muscle memory for the
Cyrillic layout. (Typing then would be a LOT of trial and error for
me.)

If you indeed grew up on a Russion keyboard, your suggestion of just
switching the layout is probably the easier solution. It's just not
something I'd personally be able to use in any efficient manner.

Regards,
Christian