Czenglish is a combined Czech/English xkb keyboard layout, mostly useful for geeks who often need to type characters present on English keyboard layout, but are not willing to resign on writing Czech properly with diacritics.

• Unless a modifier key is pressed, the layout is English.

• By pressing a modifier key together with a letter, you'll write a letter with an acute, caron etc. You can combine this with the shift key to write capital letters with diacritics.

The basic variant is all you need in theory, the others are just if you are lazy to click through X settings to set the modifiers properly.

• basic - the keyboard layout without any modifier key preset. You can set the modifier key with parameters to setxkbmap or by clicking through your favorite app for keyboard settings.

• ralt_switch - basic + set right alt as the modifier key.

• caps_switch - basic + set caps lock as the modifier key.

• nerd - basic + set caps lock as the modifier key + shuffle other modifier keys so that: alts behave as ctrls, super and menu keys behave as alts, right ctrl behaves like left super key (this is good for invoking Gnome or Unity menus).

1. Install the layout file into your system.

   sudo su -c 'cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols
               wget -nc https://raw.github.com/jistr/czenglish/master/symbols/cen
               chmod 0644 cen'
   

2. Now you can try the layout in current session.

   basic: setxkbmap -layout cen
   ralt_switch: setxkbmap -layout cen -variant ralt_switch
   caps_switch: setxkbmap -layout cen -variant caps_switch
   nerd: setxkbmap -layout cen -variant nerd

1. Gnome 3.6 (and higher?) has a bug that makes it impossible to make custom keyboard layout persistent across sessions without editing Xkb rules. The xkb_rules_hack.sh script attempts to do exactly that. Use at your own risk, it edits system files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules.

2. Set the layout in DConf.

   basic: dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources "[('xkb', 'cen')]"
   ralt_switch: dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources "[('xkb', 'cen+ralt_switch')]"
   caps_switch: dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources "[('xkb', 'cen+caps_switch')]"
   nerd: dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/sources "[('xkb', 'cen+nerd')]"