kbd(8)

kbd8

Set national keyboard translation

Usage

kbd -l

kbd [-q] name

Overview

kbd is used to change the keyboard encoding. The encoding is set to national keyboard layout name, and a short message is printed to stdout.

The execution of kbd normally occurs in the system multi-user initialization file /etc/rc using the encoding defined in /etc/kbdtype.

The options are as follows:

-l

List all available keyboard encodings.

-q

Quiet mode. No message is printed unless an error occurs.

The “.metaesc” option can be applied to any layout. If set, keys pressed together with the ALT modifier are prefixed by an ESC character. (Standard behaviour is to add 128 to the ASCII value.)

Files

/etc/kbdtype

Default national encoding.

Releases

37 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 7 times.

  1. 2.1–2.3
  2. 2.4
  3. 2.5
  4. 2.6–3.0
  5. 3.1
  6. 5.6–5.7
  7. 5.8–7.8
  8. 7.9–8.0

-l since OpenBSD 5.6; -q since OpenBSD 5.6.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.