libxkbcommon is a keyboard keymap compiler and support library which processes a reduced subset of keymaps as defined by the XKB (X Keyboard Extension) specification. It also contains a module for handling Compose and dead keys.
See Quick Guide.
While libxkbcommon's API is somewhat derived from the classic XKB API as found in X11/extensions/XKB.h and friends, it has been substantially reworked to expose fewer internal details to clients.
See the API Documentation.
libxkbcommon does not distribute a keymap dataset itself, other than for testing purposes. The most common dataset is xkeyboard-config, which is used by all current distributions for their X11 XKB data. More information on xkeyboard-config is available here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XKeyboardConfig
The dataset for Compose is distributed in libX11, as part of the X locale data.
See Compatibility notes.
An extremely rudimentary homepage can be found at http://xkbcommon.org
xkbcommon is maintained in git at https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon
Patches are always welcome, and may be sent to either xorg-devel@lists.x.org or wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org or through github.
Bugs are also welcome, and may be reported either at Bugzilla https://bugs.freedesktop.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=libxkbcommon or Github https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/issues
The maintainers are
Many thanks are due to Dan Nicholson for his heroic work in getting xkbcommon off the ground initially.