Emacs, Linux and international keyboard layouts

Question

Is there an easy way to use Emacs key-bindings when you are using a not-English (Russian) keyboard layout?

Whenever an international layout is on, all keystrokes are

Answer 1

If you want to keep using the Russian layout in Emacs (rather than use Emacs's own input methods), the only way I know of for now is to add bindings of the form:

(define-key function-key-map [?\M-ф] [?\M-a])

This will tell Emacs that in case M-ф is not bound, it should try to lookup M-a instead. Sadly, you'll need a lot of these bindings. If someone writes up a patch/package that can automatically provide all these bindings, I'd be happy to include it in Emacs.