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

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

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.

2

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

3

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