Shyriiwook

Switch keyboard layouts programmatically!

The Problem

It’s a shame that there is no easy way to switch keyboard input layout programmatically in Ubuntu (GNOME). All the existing solutions are flawed in some way or another:

• gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources …, found in many answers in the Internet is not working anymore in the latest Ubuntu versions.

• setxkbmap … doesn’t play well with the GNOME Shell. It switches the layout, but the UI doesn’t reflect the change and you cannot switch languages with the keyboard shortcut anymore untill you restart.

• The gdbus call … method org.gnome.Shell.Eval is deprecated & disabled due to the security reasons with the Eval method.

• Finally, the org.gnome.Shell.Shell.Eval replacement is really sketchy, and it’s essentially the same powerfulr Eval but from a third-party dev from GitHub.

The Solution

Shyriiwook is a GNOME Shell extension that allows to switch keyboard layouts programmatically. The extension exposes a D-Bus interface, that could be used to query for the available layouts and to switch between them via gdbus call …. However, it is programmed to only switch between the layouts, and does not expose a security breach like the Eval method.

Usage

First, install the extension. You could find it in the GNOME Extensions. Just follow the instructions.

Alternatively, you could use the Extension Manager app to find Shyriiwook and install it from there.

Finally, you could build the extension from the source code and install it manually.

After the extension is installed, you could use the gdbus tool to query for the available layouts and to switch between them.

To query for the available layouts, run:

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

It will output something like this:

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

These availableLayouts could be used to switch between the layouts, just pass one of them as an argument to the activate method:

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

The currentLayout property, obviously, contains the current layout.

That’s it! Now you could use those in your scripts, or even bind it to a keyboard shortcut in Gnome settings. To do that, add a new custom shortcut with the dbus call … command under the "Settings" → "Keyboard" → "Keyboard Shortcuts" → "View and Customise Shortcuts" → "Custom Shortcuts".

Building from source

First, determine your GNOME version. Starting from GNOME 45 some of the APIs used by the extension have changed, so you need to build the extension with the correct version.

To build the extension, you need to have the Make build tool installed.

Then, just run:

make 42 # To build for the GNOME 42
make 45 # To build for the GNOME 45

The build directory will contain the extension in a corresponding subdirectory.

To build the extension ZIP archive, run:

make extension-42
make extension-45

If you want to tinker with the extension, you could symlink the directory to the extensions directory:

ln -s $(pwd)/42 ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]

To build and install the extension, you could run

make install