swaylayout

Get the current Sway keyboard layout

Table of contents

• Installation
• Prerequisites
• Usage
• Raison d’être
• Contributing
• License

Installation

For now:

cargo install --git https://github.com/filalex77/swaylayout

Prerequisites

Get the identifier of your keyboard, e.g.

$ swaymsg -t get_inputs
# ...
Input device: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard
  Type: Keyboard
  Identifier: 1:1:AT_Translated_Set_2_keyboard
  Product ID: 1
  Vendor ID: 1
  Active Keyboard Layout: English (US)
  Libinput Send Events: enabled

# here it's 1:1:AT_Translated_Set_2_keyboard

Usage

Just get the current layout:

$ swaylayout <ID>
English (US)

Listen to layout changes and output new layout on every change:

$ swaylayout --listen <ID>

Plugging that into waybar .config/waybar/config:

{
    "modules-right": [
        "custom/keyboard"
    ],
    "custom/keyboard": {
        "exec": "swaylayout --listen <ID>"
    }
}

Raison d’être

This unscientific benchmark:

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative
swaylayout	0.5 ± 0.2	0.4	1.7	1.00
pipe swaymsg into jq	28.8 ± 2.1	26.6	35.9	52.85 ± 15.14

e.g. 36-68x times faster than the naive solution

Contributing

Unlikely, but appreciated.

License

MIT, because who cares.