Unofficial Interslavic Ext. Cyrillic keyboard layout

Building and installation

To install this on your system you need ibus as your input method and ibus-table engine installed (packages ibus and ibus-table on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros).

If you have ibus-table installed, clone the repo and change directory to it:

$ git clone git@gitlab.com:silmeth/ms-cyrillic-ibus-table.git
$ cd ms-cyrillic-ibus-table

then run as a root:

sudo ibus-table-createdb -n /usr/share/ibus-table/tables/interslavic-cyrillic.db -s ./interslavic-cyrillic.txt

and copy the icon to ibus icons dir:

sudo cp ./Cyrillic_letter_Yat.svg /usr/share/ibus-table/icons/

Finally restart ibus:

ibus-restart

and you should be done and ready to choose this layout in your ibus-config.

Usage

This is a table-based layout using the same input method that many languages of East Asia use: you type in Latin characters and they get converted to characters of the other writing system.

Here, many Latin letters get converted 1-to-1 to their equivalent Cyrillic characters, but if there is some ambiguity, a list of possible candidates is present from which you may choose (using the 1–9 keys, or arrows) the one you need, eg. if you type in ‘i’, you’ll be displayed:

i (1/2)
1. і
2. и

You can use Polish-type orthography or characters with hačeks, if your default layout supports them, to input ш (sz, š, sx), ч (cz, č, cx), щ (szcz, šč, sxcx), ж (zs, zx, ż, ž), etc.

Hačeks on other letters are also supported, eg. ň will allow you to input нь and њ.

A subset of Old Cyrillic letters is also available – to write ѣ type je`, to write ѧ, ѫ, ѩ, ѭ type e~, u~, je~, ju~ (or, if your default keyboard layout have them, ę, ą, ǫ, ų, ję, ją, jǫ, jų, etc. are also supported. For old yotted letters ѥ, ꙗ, ю type |e, |a, |o or je`, ja`, ju, etc.

You can commit some characters earlier to stop them from combining into other characters, eg to write језык type j.ezyk, to write шчасце type sz.czasce.

To temporarily turn off the table-based input method (and use your default layout instead) hit Left Shift once, to go back to writing in Cyrillic, hit Left Shift again.

Acknowledgements

This layout is heavily inspired by the ibus-table-ipa-x-sampa layout.

The icon the non-copyrighted `Cyrillic letter Yat.svg file from Wikimedia Commons.