Modify keymap to add Greek keys when AltGr + letter in the console

Question

I would like to implement some Greek characters into my keymap in the console (tty). I am using Arch Linux and the directory I am working in is /usr/share/kbd/i386/qwerty/uk.map, although I don't know if this is the right place to deal with the problem.

The expected result should be:

Key pressed: d

Shift (or Caps Lock) pressed + letter: D

Alt Gr + letter: δ

Shift (or Caps Lock) pressed + Alt Gr + letter: ∆

...just like this, but in the console.

Any clues?

Answer 1

You should be able to leave the original keymap alone and just do a second loadkeys with some extra explicit changes. For example, you may currently see

$ dumpkeys|grep ' 30'|tr -s ' '
keycode 30 = +a +A Hex_A Control_a Control_a Meta_a Meta_Control_a  

So you want to change two columns of this to the greek alpha character, which is unicode U+03B1 and U+0391. If you do

$ sudo loadkeys - <<\!
      alt keycode 30 = U+03B1
shift alt keycode 30 = U+0391
!

and run dumpkeys again you should see the change:

keycode 30 = +a +A Hex_A Control_a Control_a alpha Alpha Meta_Control_a 

As you can see, my system even knows the unicodes as keysyms alpha and Alpha which I could have used instead. Simply create a file of all the changes you want to make and call loadkeys with that filename to make the modifications.