How to set US keyboard for brazillian portuguese usage in Arch Linux
Configuring keyboard for pt-br.
US Keyboards and other languages
It is a very common practice to adopt US keyboards worldwide, but the layout of these keyboards are far from ideal for many languages, which have characters sets different from the english language. The goal of this article is to explain how to configure an US keyboard to support brazillian portuguese keymap in Arch Linux.
Two main ways
There are two different sets of configurations: for console and for XOrg (X Window System). Let’s cover both.
Console configuration
The following command must be executed in order to change keyboard layout in console:
$ localectl --no-convert set-keymap br-latin1-us
This will add the following entry in /etc/vconsole.conf:
KEYMAP=br-latin1-us
This is enough to allow brazillian keymap, including cedilla, in console. But another different configuration is required for XOrg, since it does not inherit the console configuration.
XOrg configuration
The first step is to set the keyboard. The following command get the job done in a persistent way:
$ localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap us_intl
This will add the following entry in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "system-keyboard"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
Option "XkbLayout" "us_intl"
EndSection
It will work, with one (important) exception: for dead_acute + C key combination, instead of cedilla, the character U0106 (ć) is presented.
Problem: Locale
The problem is related to different locale. In order to change this, it is necessary to change the default US locale (en_US.UTF-8) to brazillian portuguese locale. The following command does the trick:
$ localectl set-locale LANG=pt_BR.UTF8
This will add the following in /etc/locale.conf:
LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8
In Arch, pt_BR.UTF8 layout details can be found in /usr/share/X11/locale/pt_BR.UTF-8/Compose file. The cedilla behavior in each locale can be perceived comparing both locale files:
$ cat /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose | grep ccedil -i
<dead_cedilla> <C> : "Ç" Ccedilla # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <comma> <C> : "Ç" Ccedilla # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <C> <comma> : "Ç" Ccedilla # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <cedilla> <C> : "Ç" Ccedilla # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<dead_cedilla> <c> : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <comma> <c> : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <c> <comma> : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <cedilla> <c> : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<dead_acute> <Ccedilla> : "Ḉ" U1E08 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<Multi_key> <acute> <Ccedilla> : "Ḉ" U1E08 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <Ccedilla> : "Ḉ" U1E08 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<dead_acute> <ccedilla> : "ḉ" U1E09 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<Multi_key> <acute> <ccedilla> : "ḉ" U1E09 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <ccedilla> : "ḉ" U1E09 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA AND ACUTE
<dead_currency> <Ccedilla> : "₵" U20B5 # CEDI SIGN
<dead_currency> <ccedilla> : "₵" U20B5 # CEDI SIGN
$ cat /usr/share/X11/locale/pt_BR.UTF-8/Compose | grep ccedil -i
<dead_acute> <C> : "Ç" Ccedilla # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<dead_acute> <c> : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
Final notes
It is also possible to configure keyboard layout on the fly, without persisting configuration, using setxkbmap -layout us -variant intl; however, the cedilla character will also only work with the brazillian-portuguese locale previously set.
