OpenBSD tries to guess your correct keyboard mapping. USB keyboards have mechanisms to declare their country code. If autodetection doesn’t work, you can change the keyboard layout with kbd(8)
, and set it at boot with /etc/kbdtype.
Before touching the keyboard layout, use kbd
to find your current keyboard map. kbd -l
lists the more than 100 keyboard encodings OpenBSD supports. Browse the list for your supported keyboard layout, or use grep
to reduce the list. I’m a Dvorak user, so I search for it like this:
# kbd -l | grep dvorak fr.dvorak us.dvorak …
My preferred layout is us.dvorak
. I enter us.dvorak
in /etc/kbdtype, and after my next reboot, the console should use the Dvorak layout.
To set the keymap immediately to Dvorak, I could use kbd
:
# kbd us.dvorak
kbd: keyboard mapping set to us.dvorak
Read more about changing the console in Chapter 17.