Hello!
Very short post today. Since I use a computer with a British keyboard I need to constantly change to Spanish when I want to type something in my mother tongue. We have a few characters that don’t exist in the English alphabet and even though I could use ASCII codes changing the layout is much easier and faster.
I work with the terminal a lot so I just use the following command
$ setxkbmap es #or other layout code
In my case I use two codes, es for the Spanish keyboard and gb for the British one.
To make this even faster and easier I’ve created a couple of aliases. I keep thing in ~/.zshrc because I use Z shell (zsh), but depending on your shell you’ll need to configure them in other files, for example, ~/.bashrc for Bash.
Simply edit the file and create the alises, these are mine:
# Edit ~/.zshrc $ vim ~/.zshrc #Aliases alias lan_gb='setxkbmap gb' #Change to British keyboard alias lan_es='setxkbmap es' #Change to Spanish keyboard
Once you’ve done this save and quit the editor. You can close and reopen your terminal or just source ~/.zshrc. You’ll be able to use your aliases after that.
Important! These changes aren’t persistent. When you reboot or close your session the keyboard layout will go back to whatever its default is.