Where is keyboard extra settings menu?

Question

Where is this menu in original Ubuntu ? I got used to it with KDE. I miss it. Really.

Please, no alternatives. I want that menu exactly

Answer 1

Current state of the keyboard extra settings menu

It's a shame you already put a bounty on your question because it looks like a duplicate. Check these out:

• How to use Alt+Shift to switch keyboard layouts?
• How to access the Keyboard Layout Options in 13.10+

Seems like this menu was still accessible in Ubuntu 12.04 but then scrapped and reimplemented as part of GNOME's ongoing effort to "simplify" things.

As pointed out in the answers I've linked to, there are several bug reports concerning the removal of these settings, this one being the most prominent.

Apparently some, but not all, of the missing settings have been moved to gnome-tweak-tool (typing section), so you might want to check that out to see if the options you're looking for are there.

gnome-tweak-tool is part of the official repositories and can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

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Workaround using setxkbmap

Overview

With that said:

The keyboard options in Ubuntu and GNOME are nothing but a frontend to the X keyboard extension (XKB). If you are fine with configuring things manually you can easily reenable all of the now-missing options with a setxkbmap command line.

Anatomy of a setxkbmap command

You can supply setxkbmap with several options at once. A very simply command to set two keyboard layouts (Russian, English) and Alt+Shift as their toggle would look like this:

setxkbmap -option grp:alt_shift_toggle -layout ru,en

You can chain different options by separating them with a comma. What follows is a setxkbmap command that sets up the same keyboard layouts as above, adds Alt Gr as a level 3 modifier, and assigns the compose key to right Super/Win:

setxkbmap -option grp:alt_shift_toggle,compose:rwin,lv3:ralt_switch -layout ru,en

Available options

There are a multitude of options controlled by setxkbmap. All of these are documented in the XKB base settings list. This file should be available on your system under /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst.

If you look through it you should be able to find all of the options equivalent to the settings removed by GNOME.

The various XKB settings are also documented under man 7 xkeyboard-config.

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Alternative to setxkbmap

If setxkbmap doesn't work for you, you can try setting the XKB options through dconf instead:

1. Install dconf-editor (sudo apt-get install dconf-editor)
2. Open dconf editor from your dash and navigate to org → gnome → desktop → input-sources
3. Add your XKB settings to xkb-options in form of an array. E.g.: ['grp:alt_shift_toggle','compose:rwin','lv3:ralt_switch']

Source: Make setxkbmap preferences being set at startup