Changing the keyboard layout RHEL 7

The keyboard layout settings enable the user to control the layout used on the text console and graphical user interfaces.

1.2.1. Displaying the Current Settings

As mentioned before, you can check your current keyboard layout configuration with the following command:

localectl status

In the following output, you can see the keyboard layout configured for the virtual console and for the X11 window system.

~]$ localectl status
   System Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8
       VC Keymap: us
      X11 Layout: us

1.2.2. Listing Available Keymaps

To list all available keyboard layouts that can be configured on your system, type:

localectl list-keymaps

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Example 1.5. Searching for a Particular Keymap

You can use grep to search the output of the previous command for a specific keymap name. There are often multiple keymaps compatible with your currently set locale. For example, to find available Czech keyboard layouts, type:

~]$ localectl list-keymaps | grep cz
cz
cz-cp1250
cz-lat2
cz-lat2-prog
cz-qwerty
cz-us-qwertz
sunt5-cz-us
sunt5-us-cz

1.2.3. Setting the Keymap

To set the default keyboard layout for your system, use the following command as root:

localectl set-keymap map

Replace map with the name of the keymap taken from the output of the localectl list-keymaps command. Unless the --no-convert option is passed, the selected setting is also applied to the default keyboard mapping of the X11 window system, after converting it to the closest matching X11 keyboard mapping. This also applies in reverse, you can specify both keymaps with the following command as root:

localectl set-x11-keymap map

If you want your X11 layout to differ from the console layout, use the --no-convert option.

localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap map

With this option, the X11 keymap is specified without changing the previous console layout setting.

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Example 1.6. Setting the X11 Keymap Separately

Imagine you want to use German keyboard layout in the graphical interface, but for console operations you want to retain the US keymap. To do so, type as root:

~]# localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap de

Then you can verify if your setting was successful by checking the current status:

~]$ localectl status
   System Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: us
      X11 Layout: de

Apart from keyboard layout (map), three other options can be specified:

localectl set-x11-keymap map model variant options

Replace model with the keyboard model name, variant and options with keyboard variant and option components, which can be used to enhance the keyboard behavior. These options are not set by default.