Turn off international characters when I use Alt-Shift-[Character]

Whenever I press (Right Alt)-Shift and a key I get an international character for that key, for example, Alt-Shift-S gives Š and Alt-Shift-Y gives Û

How do I turn this off?

I normally use this combo a lot when coding in Eclipse so it's quite annoying that I can't use it.

I have turned off the compse key in System-> Preferences-> Keyboard, then Layouts-> Options

In fact everything is disabled in that area.

Ubuntu 10.10 and Asus Laptop.

1 Answer

The AltGr (RightAlt) is a keyboard layout functionality. For example, if you use the default Great Britain keyboard layout, you (are forced to) get the AltGr functionality.

The proper solution is to change the variant of the keyboard layout. Thus, if you do use the Great Britain layout, change to some other variant for Great Britain.

Looking into /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gb I see that there are no alternative for layouts that do not use the AltGr key. So, for this example you would need to

gksudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gb

and then make this change (erase a line):

@@ -26,7 +26,6 @@ key <BKSL> { [numbersign, asciitilde, dead_grave, dead_breve ] }; key <LSGT> { [ backslash, bar, bar, brokenbar ] };
- include "level3(ralt_switch_multikey)" }; partial alphanumeric_keys 

(find this segment in the file, then remove the line that starts with the -. Then, logout and log in again. The change we did here simply mutilated the default Great Britain layout so that these extended characters are not accessible anymore.