xfce / keyboard layout switch

I am fed up with new fancy unity environment – the responsiveness of the windows simply deteriorated during the session on my Vaio VPCY11S1E laptop. The unity’s ‘external’ design is promising, but the implementation, imho, is not for long hours workers. 2D alternative lacks basic customization tools (you can’t, for example, change the size of the launcher’s icons), have no handy transparency option by design, so I quit before I tested it any further.

I am also not big fun of new Gnome: I didn’t find the idea to hide out list of open windows contributing to productivity. I would say, I am of quite opposite opinion. And constant multi-pulit zoom in – zoom out upon switching between the windows makes my sleeping acrophobian quirks to annoy me even more.

I am as much disappointed as I was when KDE had introduced their plasma desktop, which pleased the eyes, but made routing working with the desktop miserable.

So, as many I suppose, I opted for XFCE. I’ll not advertise here this gdm – enough to say that I  like it, it does have anything I need, it is lightweight and have pleasant outfit.  The problems:

XKB keyboard layout plugin. This plugin supposed to provide with switch capabilities, interface for customization and indicator icon in notification area. While the latter probably works fine, the first two unfortunately are not very useful. My current workaround for multi-lingual installation is this:

1. Create executable file somewhere (/home/me/bin/set_keyboard):

   setxkbmap -layout "us,ru" -option "grp:alt_shift_toggle"
   

2. create  file somename.desktop in directory /home/me/.config/autostart

   [Desktop Entry]
   Version=1.0
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Script
   Type=Application
   Exec=/home/me/bin/set_keyboard_layouts
   Icon=
   Terminal=false
   Hidden=false
   GenericName=