[26.04 Wayland] I've made my custom Keyboard Layout applet

General
1

Hi everyone,

As I previously mentioned earlier in this thread, I ran into the issue where the keyboard layout indicator was completely missing and unavailable on the panel under Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 (Wayland / Labwc session).

Since there wasn’t a working out-of-the-box solution available, I decided to write a applet compatible with libpeas-2 and budgie-3.0:

:link: GitHub Repository: https://github.com/AlexVDem/budgie-keyboard-layout-wayland

Key highlights:

  • Native compiled shared library (Loader=C) for the modern Budgie Wayland session.
  • Tracks layout changes instantly via the Labwc compositor’s hardware LED register (grp_led:scroll), with fallback to ibus.
  • Supports switching layouts by clicking the applet on the panel (via wtype / ibus).
  • Includes an automated installation script (install.sh).

Currently, I have implemented and styled it specifically for EN / RU layouts for my daily use. However, the codebase is lightweight, open source, and straightforward — anyone is welcome to fork it, adapt it for their own language pairs, or contribute to turning it into a fully universal multi-layout switcher.

Hope this helps anyone facing the same issue on Budgie Wayland!

2

Many thanks for this.

I will look at this soonish and if we can will create a deb package for backports 26.04 and 26.10 and add it to budgie-welcome

UB 27.04 will have the upstream solution for keyboard layouts support via an applet that has just been committed to main in the github project.

3

Ok. From a quick look, i think if you can grab the two inputsources from gsettings then it will go a long way to make it really usable for folks that dont have coding experience.