I believe this shouldn't be a "wishlist" bug report, as Xubuntu / XFCE are targetted to many low-end PCs and many of those are most likely outside USA, where this becomes an important usability problem for anyone using anything else than a standard US layout. I understand to even configure an alternate keyboard under XFCE at this point there is no "friendly" way unless you do it with the gnome tools first. Regardless, I think the way it's displayed is part of fixing the overall usability problem for anyone wishing to have keyboard variants. An XFCE bug talks about adding layout config options to this applet config dialog: http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1901
I think my initial report wasn't very precise. I lacked some information which I think I can provide now. The variant *label description* can be very long, but the label itself is at most 22 characters, most being aroun 7~ 10. I checked this in this file: /usr/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst However, even 7~10 characters is too long to show. Ultimately, this should be as configurable as the date-hour settings which permit using a variable-based template. The way variants are used, I think, is mostly as a modification of an existing keyboard layout. For example, US becomes US - International. This is in effect the keyboard layout code plus the keyboard variant description. I suggest to have the keyboard layout plus variant description as a hint (mouse-over bubble/dialog), which would make it friendly to its panel space. This, again, should be configurable by variables. In the panel applet space, I think Gnome uses an asterisk (*) to differentiate between a variant and its standard layout. So, if I follow my configuration example, If I had only one variant for US, repeatedly changing the layout would show US and US(*) only in the applet panel (or a flag with a distinctive mark). Hovering over it would show the keyboard layout plus variant description (US - International). Any other suggestions welcome. -- XFCE keyboard switcher doesn't show variant label https://launchpad.net/bugs/43185 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
