There is only one truth. It is the source.

Getting Dvorak-Qwerty layout on Ubuntu

November 29, 2014

Mac OS X has a great layout called Dvorak-Qwerty which maps all the keys to Dvorak, but when you hold the Command modifier key it maps all the letters to Qwerty so that you can use normal keyboard shortcuts.

Ubuntu does not ship with this layout. They have a normal Dvorak layout in which you must use keyboard shortcuts with the Dvorak keys. It also seems that the Linux community is actively opposed to this feature as I read a post describing that the Dvorak-Qwerty behavior previously was the default but was changed because people considered it a bug. They are wrong.

There is an implementation called xdq at https://code.google.com/p/dvorak-qwerty/source/browse/unix/xdq.c. It's a single C source file. Compile it:

gcc xdq.c -o xdq -std=gnu99 -O2 -lX11

Run it:

./xdq

That's it! Now your keys are mapped to Dvorak and your keyboard shortcuts are mapped as they should be.