Modeless Keyboard Layout Switching in GNOME with Shyriiwook

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Recently, I treated myself with a few extra keys on my mechanical keyboard (just flexin' here), and I decided to set them up to switch keyboard layouts modelessly. Little did I know that trying to make this seemingly simple feature work in GNOME would turn into a ridiculously tough challenge. That’s how my pet project, Shyriiwook (also on GitHub as madhead/shyriiwook), came to life.

Contents

The Problem

For my US-based readers who might need a broader explanation: what exactly is a keyboard layout, and why do we need to switch them? Well, consider juggling two languages in your daily life, like English and Russian. In my case, it’s even more complex with Belarusian, Polish, occasional Ukrainian, and a sprinkle of Greek glyphs. Clearly, fitting all these on a single keyboard isn’t feasible, so we resort to switching between keyboard layouts. A quick press of a magic key combination, and your keyboard starts typing in a different language!

That was a bit simplified (and stereotypical towards Americans). In my case, though, I maintain only two primary layouts: one for Latin characters covering English and Polish, and another for Cyrillic encompassing Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. I use something called Compose Key to input extra glyphs, like ў or ę, as well as Greek letters. Okay, enough flexing.

Now, the snag lies in the fact that the key combination to switch layouts is typically the same for all layouts, and they cycle in a predetermined sequence. For example, I use Win + Space to toggle between my layouts, and they cycle like this:

Here’s the problem: there’s a concealed state, a mode in this approach. This mode is obviously the current layout, typically global to the whole system, but some prefer per-window layout switching.

It either forces you to keep that mode, the current layout, in your head, or leads to inevitable mistakes when you forget to switch the layout back. Again, it might be inobvious to happy users of Latin-based alphabets, but being a developer and discussing programming (a topic full of English words, and code) in Russian is frustrating.

And I’m not the alone ranting about modality. There’s an entire article on the Wiki shedding light on some of these problems.

So, it’s not me, who invented the idea of modeless keyboard layout switching. It’s straightforward: each language has its dedicated key combination, and you could switch between them at any time, without having to remember the current layout. So, for instance, I could set up my keyboard so that Win + F1 always and unconditionally switches to the English layout, and Win + F2 switches to the Russian layout. Of course, if you are already in the requested layout, those key combinations would do nothing.

How challenging could it possibly be to achieve this in GNOME?

The Struggle

Turns out, it’s not that easy. Trying to make this work felt more like digital archaeology: digging through the sediment layers of GNOME and Linux input configuration history.

The earliest method I came across was the setxkbmap command. It’s still around and very low-level, which is impressive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t play nicely with GNOME Shell. At least not with mine. It does switch the layout, but GNOME Shell doesn’t seem to notice it. The UI indicator gets stuck, and the keyboard shortcuts stop working until you restart the session.

Yeah, no. Moving on.

Then there’s the more "modern" approach, often recommended online: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources current I suspect it stopped working somewhere around 2018, however some people still recommend it.

They wasted my time, moving on!

Then came the gdbus call … method org.gnome.Shell.Eval … trick. Basically, eval() for your desktop environment. As with every other eval() in every other programmingscripting language, it was considered unsafe, got deprecated and put to oblivion.

Fair enough, but it leaves me without a solution, so moving on!

Then someone tried to bring Eval back from the dead, and someone else repackaged it as a GNOME extension without attribution, so the original author had to put a warning in their repo.

That warning is scary, moving on!

Ah, wait, that’s it. No more options seem to exist.

The Solution

Eventually, I gave up on trying to find a solution, and just wrote an extension instead.

It’s called Shyriiwook, and it’s OSS, of course

It works by exposing a D-Bus interface, but without any Evals:

$ gdbus introspect \
    --session \
    --dest org.gnome.Shell \
    --object-path /me/madhead/Shyriiwook \
    --only-properties

node /me/madhead/Shyriiwook {
  interface me.madhead.Shyriiwook {
    properties:
      readonly as availableLayouts = ['us', 'by+ru'];
      readonly s currentLayout = 'us';
  };
};

$ gdbus call \
    --session \
    --dest org.gnome.Shell \
    --object-path /me/madhead/Shyriiwook \
    --method me.madhead.Shyriiwook.activate "by+ru"

By using the last command, you assign a dedicated shortcut to each layout. No cycling, no guessing, no hidden state, just press the key, get the layout.

I hope, the total time I saved for the humanity on switching keyboard layouts is worth the time I spent on this project 🙂

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