WTH can't you set the keyboard layout for the console?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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Assume your Home Assistant keeps crashing and your last resort is the system console.

You plug a keyboard and display to your Raspberry/Odroid/whatever, only to notice that your keyboard produces garbage.

When using a german keyboard instead the expected QWERTY, most of the letters will be in the expected places, but almost everything else won’t.

Now imagine having a french or (god forbid) a Dvorak keyboard.

Your panic just jumps to another level.

Sad reality for a lot of people out there.

The console supports US keyboard layout by default, with no way to change it.

When I was in this situation, I decided that buying a US keyboard for the purpose of using it for an average of 32 seconds per year didn’t make much sense.

So I ended up making a cheat sheet to translate the needed characters to my keyboard layout.

It kinda did the trick, but … yikes! Right?

I know. In a perfect world, nobody would ever need to use the console.

But if they do, they wouldn’t want the extra amount of trouble caused by the lack of keyboard support.

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Dvorak user here. This git issue had the most hits but was shut down by the mod. Welcome to FOSS.

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I’ve actually been in that exact situation recently. A faulty automation caused an instant CPU overload, which prevented me from accessing Home Assistant. I managed to edit the automations.yaml file through the CLI, but since I only have a German keyboard, figuring out how to save and exit the file was a nightmare. Every key I pressed produced random characters, and it took me several days to finally sort it out.

In case anyone runs into the same problem, here’s how I finally managed to save and exit the file:

Press Esc → Shift + Ö → wq → Enter

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Good news, everyone!

(You heard that in your head with Professor Farnsworth’s voice, right?)

According to a Github notification I received, persistent keymap support for the console has been added!

No idea when it’ll hit, though, nor how exactly it will work…

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Until the GitHub pull is officialle released there is an easy trick:
It helps to search/google for a picture of a QWERTY-layout and have next to you while using the console with a non-QWERTY keyboard:

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Since HA 17.0 has been released, here’s a quick guide to change the console keymap:

  1. Access the HA CLI: either connect a physical keyboard to your appliance or access the VM console if running in a VM
  2. At the ha > prompt type login, this will start a true root shell
  3. Type localectl set-keymap xx where xx is your keymap code, e.g. localectl set-keymap fr. This is the tricky part because you have to type it using a wrong keymap… as suggested by @Rixi use a picture of the QWERTY layout to help
  4. The keymap is automatically persisted in /etc/vconsole.conf, you can check by typing localectl status

Note: if your keymap is not recognized by localectl set-keymap (for some reason it was the case with the be keymap), you may need to use localectl set-x11-keymap instead.

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