Although I have to write a lot of text in German (email, chat, ...), my keyboard has got an US layout because I find programming more comfortable this way. But I need an international variant to type umlauts. Additionally I like to replace the Caps Lock key with an additional Control key. I find this more comfortable in bash and Emacs.
I use setxkbmap to set up my keyboard layout. This is my command:
setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option ctrl:nocaps
This command is called in my fvwm2 StartFunction so I do not have to enter this by hand:
DestroyFunc StartFunction AddToFunc StartFunction # ... some configuration code # My keyboard mapping + I Test (Init) Exec exec setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option ctrl:nocaps # ... some more configuration code