Icelandic with Compose Keys on Linux

Minimally expanding my existing layouts for supporting Icelandic orthography.¹

Background

Life outside Emacs can be daunting for a lot of reasons, the lack of auctex and org-latex being a major one. Additionally, for the purposes of my (somewhat current) country of residence², it is often useful to be able to type Icelandic characters without resorting to something like typeit.

Compositional Choices

I already use klfc to generate a very portable (in a Unix sense) customized VIM based Colemak binding layout. Some reasons why I first decided to modify the compose keybindings instead of extending that are³:

• The keys and bindings defined here aren’t in use enough for me to justify actually adding them to one of my levels.
• It is slightly easier to share .XCompose files compared to the klfc compatible json files.
• It also integrates nicely with my dotfiles and templates
  • There are a few tools for concatenating fragments⁴ but it seemed more straightforward to use my existing chezmoi machinery
    • The tools, especially ext-compose, can be used as a pretty definitve source of viable mappings

However, though the compose key and chords works great for TeX it isn’t exactly ideal for language bindings, so I ended up with a hybrid, where some keys are placed on the dead-greek (AltGr) level and the rest are via multi-key (a.k.a compose) chords.

Setting the Compose Key

Modern keyboards don’t often come with a dedicated compose key. For simplicity I opted to choose one of the default supported rules for the this:

 1grep "compose:" /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst
 2  compose:ralt         Right Alt
 3  compose:lwin         Left Win
 4  compose:lwin-altgr   3rd level of Left Win
 5  compose:rwin         Right Win
 6  compose:rwin-altgr   3rd level of Right Win
 7  compose:menu         Menu
 8  compose:menu-altgr   3rd level of Menu
 9  compose:lctrl        Left Ctrl
10  compose:lctrl-altgr  3rd level of Left Ctrl
11  compose:rctrl        Right Ctrl
12  compose:rctrl-altgr  3rd level of Right Ctrl
13  compose:caps         Caps Lock
14  compose:caps-altgr   3rd level of Caps Lock
15  compose:102          The "< >" key
16  compose:102-altgr    3rd level of the "< >" key
17  compose:paus         Pause
18  compose:ins          Insert
19  compose:prsc         PrtSc
20  compose:sclk         Scroll Lock

I went with compose:ralt since compose:lalt isn’t thing. Setting this in sway is simple and stacks well with the other settings:

1# To test
2swaymsg 'input * xkb_options compose:ralt'

To set this permanently:

1input * {
2      xkb_options "compose:ralt"
3}

Mapping Icelandic

I used TypeIt as a reference, since I’m rather used to it. The mapping therefore proceeds in two stages, an AltGr layer, and some compose keychords.

AltGr Layer

For the base keys, I did end up first extending the AltGr layer, with the following, as depicted in Fig. fig:altgrlayeris ⁵:

Which is defined in another json file:

 1{
 2  "filter": "no tmk",
 3  "singletonKeys": [
 4    [ "Alt_L", "AltGr" ]
 5  ],
 6  "shiftlevels": [ "AltGr", "Shift+AltGr" ],
 7  "keys": [
 8    { "pos": "A", "letters": [ "á", "Á" ] },
 9    { "pos": "F", "letters": [ "þ", "Þ" ] },
10    { "pos": "G", "letters": [ "ð", "Ð" ] },
11    { "pos": "K", "letters": [ "é", "É" ] },
12    { "pos": "L", "letters": [ "í", "Í" ] },
13    { "pos": ";", "letters": [ "ó", "Ó" ] },
14    { "pos": "I", "letters": [ "ú", "Ú" ] },
15    { "pos": "O", "letters": [ "ý", "Ý" ] }
16  ]
17}

Installation is similar to the previous post:

 1git clone https://github.com/39aldo39/klfc
 2cd klfc
 3# Kanged from the AUR https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/klfc/
 4cabal v1-update
 5cabal v1-install --only-dependencies --ghc-options=-dynamic --force-reinstalls
 6cabal v1-configure --prefix=/usr --ghc-options=-dynamic
 7cabal v1-build
 8# Build layout
 9./dist/build/klfc/klfc ~/.config/klfc/colemak.json ~/.config/klfc/extendVIM.json ~/.config/klfc/is_altgr_Colevim.json -o colevimIS
10# Install
11cd colevimIS/xkb/
12./install-system.sh && ./scripts/install-xcompose.sh

Compose Keychords

It turns out there are really only two left:

1# ~/.XCompose
2<Multi_key> <a> <e> : "æ"
3<Multi_key> <o> <i> : "ö"

Conclusions

This is going to take a while to get used to for sure, but eventually it should help me reduce the time it takes me to get thoughts on (digital) paper in Icelandic. I will probably need to touch type on something like fastfingers ⁶.

I had hoped to include a bunch of unicode math and other compose keychords, but it is annoying to have to keep track of the translations like * to asterisk and similar⁷.