[Zirias]

For Wayland, keyboard input is "out of scope". (edit: Not entirely, just verified it does forward very basic events, but it's a thing wayland doesn't want to handle, while X11 originally had its own keyboard/mouse/etc drivers) What's typically used is XKB (inherited from X11) with a different backend ([edit: raw events]). So yes, in practice, you'll have the same broken design.

> Also, there seem to be no sane API for managing layouts or switching > them programatically

Layouts only exist as "data" as far as the X server is concerned, clients must fetch them and map themselves from the key codes. Libraries like xkbcommon (or even grandfather Xlib) do the job for you. That said, there are APIs to modify the mapping (by publishing messages/events) as you wish. The ugliness is, apart from the fact that you're forced to fiddle with the mapping at all, that you can't guarantee another client will process everything in sequence. It might apply a new mapping before processing all its queued key press events. That's why my code adds delays between fiddling with the mapping and sending the events.

Yes, it's extremely ugly. Still, at least for me, it works. Try it out ;)

And yes, Windows is doing better here, there's a Unicode-flavor of keyboard events available.