Some 15 years back on a weekend I visited my guruji’s place to fix something on his computer. I was amazed to find he had a keyboard with Hindi (Devanagari) letters. In those days I used to type in Hindi (on Windows) by enabling Asian languages. I later even bought Devanagari stickers and adorned my laptop. Back then my guruji told me he actually bought the keyboard and a Hindi typing software package for Rs 2,500 when he visited India. It was too much for a college student that I was.

When I started using Linux I was amazed at how simple things are. Linux uses Bolnagri, which is a phonetic input method. That being said when you type M on the keyboard it displays म on the screen. Thus typing mera actually displays मेरा. This makes typing a lot easier and faster.

In my previous post in the Hindi/Sanskrit category I showed how to install Indic fonts on Linux systems. To enable Devanagri input go to your Keyboard Preferences and click on Layouts.

Click on the Add button, select India from countries list and Indian Hindi (Bolnagri) from the variants list. Add it.

Once added you can select the language input from your task panel. See in the screenshot below it’s currently set to English. Upon clicking it should display “in” which would mean Indian/Hindi (Bolnagri) as we defined earlier.

Happy Hindi typing!