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I use four different keyboard layouts and three of them look too similar; it becomes confusing in practice.

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In fact, one of these (ro_cedilla) is almost identical to US English keyboard, with only a few special shortkeys for Romanian special characters (but which makes me prefer it to the normal English layout) and I want it for writing in English and general use of the computer.

I would like it to appear named as us, en, or something like that.

Can I edit the tray entry ro for this layout?

(It is not clear to me what the 'edit' command in the properties of the panel applet (second image) really does: when selecting an installed layout and clicking 'edit', it opens the options to add new layout, not to edit the one selected.)

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The panel applet, xfce4-xkb-plugin relies on several files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules such as evdev.lst and evdev.xml. You can't edit any of these files with the plugin (even if running it with gksudo, which is not recommended). You are correct when you say the 'edit' button just allows you to replace the selected layout, but not edit the title of the layout.

On the official site for xfce4-xkb-plugin, in any other available documentation, and in the source code, there seems to be no hidden options. The documentation does mention about it not handling other xkb options that well (and you are limited to a small number of options), so if you plan to make use of a lot of the available xkb options you might need to use the setxkbmap utility so you can have a more powerful tool to specify multiple options for layouts.

You could of course construct a custom xkb layout, although that is maybe too much if you only want to edit the titles of the layouts, and a discussion of that is probably beyond the remit of the question. However, for more on xkb and custom layouts, see the official xkb documentation.


So, it's definitely not possible to edit the layout names using xfce4-xkb-plugin itself.

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  • i was referring to a solution proportional to the 'importance' of the matter as presented in the question. that is, it is not that important. so, i'll give up, or i'll use the english :)
    – user47206
    Apr 5, 2013 at 17:14
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    @cipricus Ok, I was just giving some extra background info in the answer relating to xkb. I have investigated the matter, and it's definitely not possible to edit the layout names using xfce4-xkb-plugin itself.
    – user76204
    Apr 5, 2013 at 17:17

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