Simple Linux keyboard switching: Carillon

As part of my work on my custom Linux distribution, I needed an application that:

• had a graphical user interface,
• listed a set of keyboard layouts,
• applied them when changed,
• used low-level X components only.

A very simple set of requirements. And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Most of them are tied to a specific desktop environment, like GNOME or KDE. Or they use their own complex components, like iBus. I knew about xkb but everything I’d used was either CLI-only or were static graphical views.

So I built my own: Carillon (which is a form of musical keyboard and is a nicely unique name). As a version 1, it’s functional but basic. It works with a fixed set of keyboard layouts from a YAML file, which can be put in a number of locations. There’s a simple systray icon that supports selecting the layout manually. That’s it!

I will revisit it at some stage because I did it in Python initially. This made it easy to build up a quick prototype, but as a long-term approach it’s inefficient and difficult to distribute due to Python dependencies. The interface is what I want though. It fills a basic need for my custom distro DistroD which I blogged about before. Maybe Rust, or Swift?