[HN Gopher] Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout
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Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout
Author : noname120
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-11-15 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tom_ wrote:
| The BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum used ASCII 0x60 for PS, the early
| 1980s probably being about the last time you could design a
| computer without caring what Americans thought. Maybe you could
| sort-of follow that trend, by squeezing PS onto the ~` key
| somewhere, and cover even more of Europe-the-continent with the
| basic layout?
|
| (Why does the 102nd key (between left shift and Z) have another
| copy of < and >? This is good in a sense, because the layout
| works for both ANSI- and ISO-type keyboards. But it does seem a
| bit redundant.)
|
| While as a longstanding US-Dvorak user, I would not contemplate
| switching back to QWERTY, this layout does look very sensible. I
| particularly like the US-style punctuation placement. (Far
| superior, in my view! " in particular is very convenient.)
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| Interesting. Years ago, I made a very similar custom Dvorak
| layout for French accents. The main benefit was that all vowels
| are located on the left side of the middle row.
|
| With that said, I don't think I've typed a French accent on a
| physical keyboard in almost a decade. For the most part (99%),
| I've stopped reading and writing in French. On the rare occasions
| I need to write French formally, I usually copy and paste the
| accents missed by the spell checker.
| argentinian wrote:
| It's not the same idea because it doesn't try to make it look
| like querty, but the colemak layout allows typing characters from
| most languages with a modifier key and sometimes (for the less
| common characters) a combo. In this link it illustrates this
| https://colemak.com/Multilingual
|
| And linux (or at least Ubuntu) includes it by default. For
| spanish and german it's great.
| baby wrote:
| > The official and widely spread keyboard layout in France is
| AZERTY. Compared to QWERTY, it adds extra letters such as << e >>
| and << c >>. Unfortunately a lot of characters are missing, for
| example it's impossible to type << E >> or << C >>. It's also
| impossible to type the French quotation marks (<< >>), and other
| special characters such as << oe >> and << ae >>. French users
| usually rely on autocorrect to fix the shortcomings of AZERTY,
| which is unacceptable.
|
| I would argue that we should just get rid of accents on uppercase
| letters, and that we should get rid of characters like oe and ae.
| Also what is the point of having different quotation marks? Even
| in english. Language gets simpler over time, let's just take a
| shortcut.
| version_five wrote:
| If you were writing something formal for work, and were told to
| just get rid of essential characters or punctuation in your
| working language and adopt those of another language, do you
| think your audience would be OK with that?
| baby wrote:
| I'm not talking about adopting those of another language, I'm
| talking about L'Academie francaise changing the rules of the
| language, like they've done multiple times to simplify the
| language[1]. Do you find all these extra accents confusing?
| Most French people do as well, and most people do not use
| them correctly anyway (even in writing). It's not just French
| people, my SO is Romanian and they have the same issue and
| will often omit their special characters when writing.
|
| [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifications_orthographi
| ques...
| penjelly wrote:
| i like the idea of using a keyboard layout thats more efficient
| for typing common characters, less finger travel. But the thought
| of having to relearn muscle memory and not being able to just
| grab any old keyboard are both huge turnoffs for me.
|
| i assume for #2 i could programmatically remap keys with no
| effect in input latency? which then would require merely changing
| a few keycaps around... can anyone confirm if this would be the
| case?
| aiibe wrote:
| Tested on Windows 10 with no issues.
|
| I use QWERTY for coding but sometimes need to document other
| things in French. This is a pain killer.
| noname120 wrote:
| As a resident of France, the official and widespread keyboard
| layout is AZERTY.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/KB_Franc...
| (AZERTY layout screenshot)
|
| It looks similar to QWERTY, but some letters are swapped
| around[1], and some extra characters are added so that we can
| type in French easily -- well at least that was the intent.
|
| The big problem with this layout is that we can't type proper
| French with it. A lot of characters are missing, for example you
| can type << e >> but not << E >> which is its uppercase
| counterpart. Same goes with << c >>, you need to remember to type
| the unicode key code with Alt+128 to type << C >> otherwise you
| need to cross fingers that the autocorrect will catch it. Oh and
| those French quotation marks that I'm using? They are not
| available on AZERTY either! Even though they are the ones that
| should be used in French.
|
| Another problem is that I'm a programmer and QWERTY is
| colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak. Every piece of
| software in the world and every shortcut is meant for the QWERTY
| layout. Using another layout is the source of a lot of pain
| because intuitive shortcuts become awkward, or simply don't work
| at all and a lot of remapping is required.
|
| In a nutshell, AZERTY is the worst of both worlds -- the people
| who designed it just wanted to see the world burn apparently.
|
| Due to this frustration I've been working on a keyboard layout
| that does exactly the opposite: bring the best of both worlds.
| This layout is called qwerty-fr.
|
| https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/raw/master/qwerty-fr-...
| (QWERTY-fr layout screenshot)
|
| It can look a bit overwhelming at first, but it's actually really
| simple. It is a strict superset of QWERTY, which means that
| anyone who knows QWERTY can type on this layout without even
| knowing that it's not a real QWERTY layout. Additionally, all the
| accentuated characters can be typed directly by combining the
| right Alt and another key, contrary to what it looks this is
| actually very convenient and doesn't slow down French typing
| speed noticeably.
|
| It goes further, I've added special dead keys that make it super
| easy to type greek and currencies (math is coming soon). Just do
| AltGr + g (g for "greek") and the layout becomes:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/pCHipNH.png (Greek layout screenshot)
|
| You can then press any letter to type the corresponding greek
| character -- for example "p" for "p".
|
| For currencies, press AltGr + Shift + 5, and the layout
| becomes[3]:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/XH6gp6c.png (Currency layout screenshot)
|
| You can then just press the letter "y" for "Y=". Easy peasy.
|
| Next step is adding a math dead key[4], but that's for another
| release.
|
| [1] Nobody knows why the A and Q were swapped, neither why the Z
| and W were swapped. Also why on earth is there an entire key
| exclusively dedicated to << 2 >>?!
|
| [2] EUR is on AltGr + 5, which makes it easy to remember.
|
| [3] This rendering of the currency layout is actually outdated,
| I've switched the positions of the currencies to make them easier
| to remember. For example, "p" now yields "PS". You can see the
| current mapping here: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-
| fr/blob/aa44310587f574cb...
|
| [4] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/issues/11
| zokier wrote:
| I did too create my own keyboard layout based on us-intl layout
| because the local (fi/sv) native keyboard is pretty bad. I took
| bit more liberties with the layout to be more of a compromise
| (;:<> were moved around to make space for oa), but overall I'm
| really happy with the result and recommend better keyboard
| layouts to any non-US developers/power-users.
|
| US-intl layout: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDUSX/
|
| Finnish layout: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/
|
| Note how all of ~[]{}\$@| are only accessible with altgr.
|
| My layout:
| https://kbdlayout.info/06e90945-d036-4d0b-9627-7e840edf9b4e
| simlevesque wrote:
| As a francophone, I've always used Canadien Multilingue Standard,
| it's perfect if your goal is to write english and french.
| giaour wrote:
| Seconded! I taught French in the US, and Canada multilingual
| was the most ergonomic way to switch between languages without
| switching keyboard layouts.
| timost wrote:
| I use linux UK international layout. Like AZERTY, it's an ISO
| based layout:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards...
|
| It's not available on windows though, so I had to hack a lenovo
| thinkpad external keyboard to make it compatible with QMK to be
| able to work properly at my current job.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Given how everybody has a different answer (use the
| Canadian/Spanish/Swiss keyboard, use the Compose key, go for
| Colemak/Dvorak...) that seems to overlook how, like it or not,
| the US Qwerty keyboard is _the_ standard for programmers, I think
| you 're on to something!
|
| Good luck to you!
|
| One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different
| standards, for some reason. Besides the keyboard, I've also
| noticed they have a lot of WIFI channel exclusions.
|
| I'm not saying it's good or bad, but do you think this might
| impede the success of your project?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Given how everybody has a different answer (use the
| Canadian/Spanish/Swiss keyboard, use the Compose key, go for
| Colemak/Dvorak...)
|
| I'd advise the author to go one step further and adopt the ANSI
| layout instead of ISO. So you can just get the US version with
| most of the keys already etched with the correct symbol, no
| matter where you are in the world.
|
| > One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different
| standards, for some reason.
|
| Not French, but here's an observation: the French world has
| great engineering schools like the Polytechniques (Paris,
| Montreal, Lausanne) or Mines. And the French government
| historically had military procurement and R&D done inside the
| country as well. They are, for instance, the only country
| outside of the United States to have built and operate a
| nuclear aircraft carrier.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I'd advise the author to go one step further and adopt the
| ANSI layout instead of ISO. So you can just get the US
| version with most of the keys already etched with the correct
| symbol, no matter where you are in the world.
|
| Totally. I once had to use a UK keyboard with this weird
| vertical ISO enter key - it's a pain.
|
| I think I might live with a smaller space bar, as I got a
| rare IBM SK-8835 keyboard in JP locale before I could source
| a US one ( see: http://www.komotch2.com/junk/kj/sk8835lj.htm
| ): the true dealbreaker was the ISO enter key.
|
| The carveout from the spacebar were actually pretty handy, to
| map with AutoHotKey extra keys staying right by my thumbs :)
|
| > They are, for instance, the only country outside of the
| United States to have built and operate a nuclear aircraft
| carrier.
|
| I love that a lot of countries do a lot of things: we need
| more alternatives to avoid duopolies (MIPS to avoid AMD64 vs
| ARM64, Firefox OS to avoid Android vs iOS)
|
| And it's even better when the 3rd alternative offers unique
| advantages!
|
| But using a different keyboard layout for no reason at all...
| sorry, I don't get that. It makes life harder for everyone,
| with 0 practical benefit.
|
| It's like if some country mandated a square USB-C connector:
| breaking a standard, just for the pleasure of breaking it, to
| make things more expansive, create more e-waste, etc.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > But using a different keyboard layout for no reason at
| all... sorry, I don't get that. It makes life harder for
| everyone, with 0 practical benefit.
|
| It originally appeared in the 19th century for typewriters,
| so it's not exactly new.
| tbassetto wrote:
| > the French seem to enjoy using different standards
|
| I chuckled :). How dare they use the metric system and degree
| Celsius? You got me curious about the WiFi channels though, but
| it looks like there is nothing specific to France:
| https://www.lairdconnect.com/support/faqs/what-channels-are-...
| scottlamb wrote:
| >> the French seem to enjoy using different standards
|
| > How dare they use the metric system and degree Celsius?
|
| Judgements about what they dare to do aside, isn't it fair to
| call those French? The metric system is based on the meter, a
| French unit. The International Prototype Kilogram (obsoleted
| only recently) was stored in France. While Celsius wasn't
| invented in France, a Frenchman flipped the scale
| (originally, freezing was 100 and boiling was 0). etc.
|
| Not Invented Here syndrome doesn't mean that what you do
| invent here can't be good, that you can't sometimes get the
| rest of the world to agree with you, or that you abandon
| anything that's successful.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't think you're right about the US layout being standard
| for programmers. It might be in some countries, but I've meet
| maybe two Danish prograamers that uses US layout.
|
| The weird part about this layout is that you can use it for
| English, French, German and Swedish (maybe more), but leave out
| exactly one Danish characther making it useless for Danish. Why
| leave even add ae and o if you leave out a?
| jonsen wrote:
| I don't think we've met. I'm Danish. I use the US keyboard
| layout.
| elros wrote:
| No idea about o but ae is used (very rarely, to be fair) in
| French. Famously, it's used in the name Laetitia. We enjoy
| having characters that are important but comparatively rare,
| such as u, which has a key of its own in the French keyboard
| even though it is used in a single word, "ou" (meaning
| where), to differentiate it from "ou" (meaning or). I've
| always felt the key might as well say "ou" on it :-)
| noname120 wrote:
| Thank you! :)
|
| The fact that most people ask "Why shouldn't I use alternative
| <x> instead?" means that I need to improve my README file to
| show better why QWERTY-fr is truly different from all the other
| keyboard layouts, and what makes it stick out!
|
| Colloquially, I already planned to update the website[1] with a
| tutorial guiding the user step by step through the philosophy.
| Hopefully this will help users understand its value
| proposition!
|
| [1] https://qwerty-fr.org
|
| --
|
| With regards to the different standards, I agree that French
| people tend to reinvent the wheel. I have nothing against that
| but the big issue is that they _never_ look well at the
| previous attempts, which leads to crappy alternative standards.
| This project aims to reinvent the wheel but in a good way!
|
| I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a
| standardization organization once it's stable. It should help
| adoption because I could then convince OS maintainers to add it
| as an available layout. :)
| laurent123456 wrote:
| > With regards to the different standards, I agree that
| French people tend to reinvent the wheel. I have nothing
| against that but the big issue is that they never look well
| at the previous attempts
|
| Well not everything as to be from America and in English
| language. Different attempts are made in different countries
| and it's true that US attempts tend to stick, not necessarily
| because they are superior, but because of the general US
| influence.
|
| It's true that AZERTY is an annoying layout but only because
| everything is made as if the only existing layout was QWERTY.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I agree that French people tend to reinvent the wheel.
|
| If their wheel is better, why not?
|
| > I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they
| never look well at the previous attempts, which leads to
| crappy alternative standards. This project aims to reinvent
| the wheel but in a good way!
|
| Great answer, I totally agree!!
|
| I wish you a lot of luck, as I'm a bit irked to have to
| provide support for weird keyboards! (I hope someone from
| Germany will do as you did so QWERTZ can also die :-)
|
| > I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a
| standardization organization once it's stable.
|
| Even better! Using standards is a great way to work around
| many issues.
|
| One last thing: if I may suggest, you should replace the
| default picture by one with fewer characters: the german b,
| the spanish N, and the scandinavian character (oslash, ae)
| may be nice to have, but they may play against you: French
| users may see them as irrelevant, and cluttering the
| keyboard.
|
| Trim everything you can, to only have as little extra
| characters as necessary to support french.
|
| For similar reasons, you may want to unify the blue and the
| red overlays. I've figured out that the right Alt did toggle
| the blue overlay, but I still don't understand how to get the
| red one.
|
| Given that blue and red do not coexist on any key, merging
| the red keys into the blue overlay may be for the better: you
| want what you offer to be extremely clear and simple to
| understand
| noname120 wrote:
| > One last thing: if I may suggest, you should replace the
| default picture by one with fewer characters: the german b,
| the spanish N, and the scandinavian character (oslash, ae)
| may be nice to have, but they may play against you: French
| users may see them as irrelevant, and cluttering the
| keyboard.
|
| This is a very good suggestion! I should definitely show a
| simplified screenshot, and only introduce the extra
| characters in an advanced section. This should make it look
| less overwhelming.
|
| > For similar reasons, you may want to unify the blue and
| the red overlays. I've figured out that the right Alt did
| toggle the blue overlay, but I still don't understand how
| to get the red one.
|
| For other readers, you're referring to https://qwerty-
| fr.org/. Blue means that it's accessible with AltGr, and
| red means that the key is a dead key.
|
| In a nutshell:
|
| - Lower left corner: no modifier.
|
| - Upper left corner: Shift.
|
| - Lower right corner: AltGr.
|
| - Upper right corner: AltGr + Shift.
|
| I agree that this is confusing, especially since the
| keyboard widget doesn't highlight the layer when you press
| e.g. AltGr + Shift so it's hard to know what's going to
| happen.
| scastiel wrote:
| Have you tried the Canadian-French layout? It's pretty much what
| you were looking for ;)
| noname120 wrote:
| I find the Canadian-French layout[1] to be pretty hard to
| learn, because the placement of characters is confusing. For
| example:
|
| - +- is on key 1 (?)
|
| - 2 is on key 8 (?!)
|
| - can't directly type eeee, aaa, uuu, iii[2].
|
| - EUR is not available (big oops for a French keyboard layout).
|
| - oe and ae are not available either.
|
| - no support for no-break space and narrow no-break space (they
| are mandatory in French around punctuation).
|
| QWERTY-fr aims to be super easy to learn if you know QWERTY
| thanks to its logical philosophy -- you can read about it
| here[3].
|
| What do you think? :)
|
| [1] http://kbdlayout.info/KBDCA/
|
| [2] You need to press a dead key first, which is awkward and
| slow. The fact that dead keys are placed seemingly randomly
| makes it even worse.
|
| [3] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#-philosophy-overview
| leblancfg wrote:
| Here's a link to the MacOS version layout for alt-codes,
| which I believe handles all your points except the last:
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/v1ZLm.png
| noname120 wrote:
| Thank you for the clarification. If I understand correctly,
| one needs to press two keys to print << E >>. Do you agree?
|
| If it's right, I believe that it only invalidates point #4.
| FrancoisBosun wrote:
| Shift + /, when using fr-CA, does return E. Is that what
| you meant with "two keys". For oe or OE, I use Option+Q
| or Option+Shift+Q (Mac Big Sur).
| DocTomoe wrote:
| You seem to be trying to solve a problem that could easily be
| solved by using a Compose key:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
| abrowne wrote:
| I recently switched from compose key to this layout (and
| suggested to the developer to update the Linux release ;-) and
| it is much nicer to type eg AltGr+a for a instead of Compose+`
| then a. (I keep compose on PrtSc for extra characters like
| arrows.)
| Zealotux wrote:
| As a French, I consider the Spanish (Spain) keyboard to be the
| ultimate layout, that one doesn't look bad but way too bloated.
| noname120 wrote:
| Contrary to QWERTY-fr, you can't type accentuated letters
| directly with the Spanish layout[1]. I find that it
| considerably lowers my speed when typing French.
|
| I agree that QWERTY-fr looks bloated on the first look, but the
| position of keys actually make sense so it is super easy to
| learn. I recommend you to read the philosophy[2] behind this
| keyboard layout.
|
| What do you think?
|
| [1] https://www.goodtyping.com/teclatESP.png
|
| [2] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#-philosophy-overview
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Same here. I've been using the Spanish layout for fifteen years
| now, and it's so natural to use with a QWERTY layout and
| diacritics even on uppercase.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Swiss layout is the best layout for French speakers
| noname120 wrote:
| Can you type << C >> and << E >> with the Swiss layout[1]? What
| about the French quotation marks (<< >>)?
|
| [1] https://www.goodtyping.com/teclatSWI.htm
| Tagbert wrote:
| Does anyone make a small auxiliary keyboard, similar to a
| freestanding numpad, that can be programmed for various
| characters and functions? I would love to be able to setup a
| custom keyboard for special characters that I need repeatedly but
| don't want to have to force them onto the regular keyboard.
| frederikvs wrote:
| Search the web for "macropad", you should find what you need.
| If you go for something QMK-based, you can program it any way
| you want.
| djbeadle wrote:
| I believe you're looking for a "macropad". I recently bought
| this one from Adafruit and while not life changing it is pretty
| nifty especially combined with BetterTouchTool.
|
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I wish all keyboards had dedicated cut/copy/paste buttons.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Get yourself a macro pad. I have a KeebIO BDN9 rev2:
| https://keeb.io/collections/frontpage/products/bdn9-rev-2-3x...
| - It requires some soldering, but there's other versions and
| types of macropad that don't need assembling.
|
| Here's mine, top left: https://imgur.com/gallery/Pa51o8c
|
| (apologies, that was the image I had immediately available)
| Top row is volume, Emacs save (ctrl-x ctrl-s), scroll/zoom
| Middle row is layer change, Meta-x (command palette in Emacs),
| Ctrl-g (quit/escape in Emacs) Bottom row is Meta, Super,
| Esc-c (in my zsh, it runs "fd --type directory" in the fzf
| tool, which lets me type a few characters of a directory to cd
| to it, however deep it is)
|
| Macro pads can be controlled by QMK firmware (which I use)
| which is reconfigured by editing c code. There's also VIA
| firmware which is also very flexible. Other manufacturers will
| have their own proprietary systems.
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, why is the Greek layout not the same as the el keyboard
| layout? I know it's geared towards the French language, but it
| seems needlessly complicated to map the Greek letters differently
| from the Greek layout...
| speedgoose wrote:
| I personally use the bepo layout which, to me, feels better than
| qwerty or azerty layouts. Have you tried to use the bepo layout?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%89PO
| https://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil
| noname120 wrote:
| Yes I did! I actually used to have bepo as my primary keyboard
| layout.
|
| My main problem with it is that it only optimizes French, and
| it (implicitly) deoptimizes everything else. For example "W" is
| awkwardly placed at the very edge of the keyboard, which makes
| typing English pretty annoying. Keyboard shortcuts are pretty
| inconvenient as well.
|
| Imho bepo is great if you write pages of raw text every day in
| French -- for example journalists and writers. But apart from
| this it's not pragmatic for other usages -- and I want my
| keyboard layout to be good enough everywhere, not just at
| typing French.
| athenot wrote:
| I switched from AZERTY to QWERTY and can type French nearly as
| fast. On the Mac, doing Ee, Ee, Ii, Oo, Ou, Ii, etc is not
| noticeably slower.
| airstrike wrote:
| How about just using Qwerty + US International?
|
| aeaecaeoaeiui AEAECAE...
|
| You can even do <<>> with Alt Gr+[ and ] and EUR with Alt Gr+5
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| Yes! As a French Canadian, that's my preferred layout.
|
| Its advantage is that it uses dead keys to add diacritic.
|
| For instance (Alt Gr+i then [normal vowel key]) will give
| ioea... You just have to know the diacritic position and press
| the normal letter to apply it.
| aloisdg wrote:
| This is what I do to.
| 3np wrote:
| aka us-altgr-intl. Sounds to me like the author may not be
| aware of it, as it addresses all their major motivations
| davidinosauro wrote:
| Are you referring to "US International with AltGr dead keys"?
| I use it too for programming, English text and sporadic
| Italian text -- so I'm not annoyed by the dead keys unless I
| actively look for them.
|
| FWIW, growing up in Italy I have the same complaint as the OP
| about not being able to type E in the italian keyboard -- it
| comes up somewhat often in prose.
|
| My only complaint is that I occasionally write to colleagues
| named Pawel or Michal which are not typable
| axegon_ wrote:
| This is actually a pretty good idea. I speak 2 languages besides
| English so this covers one of them completely. Sure, it doesn't
| cover Cyrillic, which is the second most frequently used but even
| so, this would completely eliminate the necessity to switch
| between English and Spanish whenever needed. Cyrillic annoyingly
| can't be solved easily but I guess it's still a good deal. I'm
| willing to re-map my keyboard and give it a shot and see if that
| would make sense as a daily driver.
| shimonabi wrote:
| As someone who started to learn French just a few years ago, I
| was really shocked that you couldn't easily type certain
| characters on a standard French keyboard.
|
| I discovered the "voluntary" AZERTY Z71-300 standard since then
| and I've been using it since on Windows.
|
| https://norme-azerty.fr/
| yosito wrote:
| I found the AZERTY Wikipedia page to be interesting as well
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY
| iKnowKungFoo wrote:
| I read that as "QWERTY For Real". :)
| noname120 wrote:
| I chuckled haha :)
| 1_player wrote:
| What about EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/
|
| It's preinstalled on Linux, and available for macOS and Windows
| as well. I feel a keyboard based on the US layout which far too
| often is considered a standard (better for coding and buggy
| software and games), with dead keys and diacritics is a fantastic
| idea.
|
| I have migrated all my machines to use it instead of the custom
| layouts or the US one that's very restrictive when you need to
| write accents.
| abrowne wrote:
| > EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/
|
| > It's preinstalled on Linux
|
| Note that at least on Ubuntu/Debian, the included version is
| older and a bit different. Not unusable or anything, but not
| the same as on the website.
| JeremyTheo wrote:
| I wanted to post the same. I am German and I am using it for my
| daily tasks. It combines the easy to program US layout with
| easy access to German Umlauts A, O, U, ss.
|
| Highly recommended. No idea though for any other languages
| other than German.
| fowlie wrote:
| It works very well for Norwegian too.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > What about EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/
|
| Not much 'euro', eastern europe is missing as a whole. E.g.
| polish L, czech r, slovak o, ... Either use dead keys for all
| diacritics or somehow add them all to the third and forth
| layer.
| xupybd wrote:
| I was about to say why do we need another layout but this appears
| to solve real problems that I've never encountered as an English
| speaker.
| tpfour wrote:
| Try the Canadian Multilingual French layout on a standard QWERTY
| keyboard.
|
| a is \
|
| e is '
|
| e is /
|
| c is ]
|
| accent grave is right-alt+[+letter
|
| and
|
| "specials" are right-alt+num (+-@PSC/$?!{}[]) but for any glyph
| used in programming, I usually switch back to US keyboard using
| alt+caps-lock. Ca fonctionne tres bien pour moi!
| emilecantin wrote:
| On a ISO layout (with the inverted-L "enter" key), you also get
| u between left shift and z.
|
| Accolades ({}) and brackets ([]) are on alt-7-8 and alt-9-0. A
| bit annoying to type, but manageable. At least it's somewhat
| logical (pairs are next to one another).
|
| What's nice is that this is the default French layout for Apple
| computers in Canada, so you can order one with the correct keys
| printed on it:
| https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/MK2C3LL/A/magic-keyboa...
| xcambar wrote:
| As a french and a developer and a resident of Germany, I have a
| lot of special characters to write :p
|
| I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedilla,
| accents, umlauts and more.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Same here. I'm Dutch, but write English (obviously) and
| occasionally German and a little Frisian (for place and street
| names on OpenStreetMap). Once you get used to the compose key
| all keyboards sold with the basic US layout suddenly just work
| fine, which incidentally -- as a programmer -- suits me just
| fine.
|
| Any new layout is basically dead on arrival except for a few
| keyboard geeks. Commercial viability (as in, keyboards sold
| with that layout and correct keycaps) is essentially zero
| unless a government mandates its use. The latter is not likely
| in countries like France.
|
| Making the compose-key (usually assigned to the right alt) more
| popular and better supported is probably the most effective way
| of enabling the input of letters like E, --, oe, A, c, ss, and
| EUR on desktop operating systems.
| oezi wrote:
| I wonder why CAPS isn't used more as a compose key. It is
| easier to reach than Alt+gr.
| colanderman wrote:
| I miss using Linux as my daily driver because its compose key
| support was unsurpassed. Easy to set up and to add sequences if
| the mood strikes you. Beyond simple accent marks, it could
| handle arrows, basic smileys, and even the Greek letter pi.
|
| Meanwhile on macOS Big Sur, Karabiner seems to no longer work
| correctly (and was a royal pain to set up besides), the US
| International layout doesn't include a proper compose key (it
| just turns all punctuation keys into dead keys), and the dead
| keys don't even make all basic combinations (e.g. Polish "c" or
| Esperanto "c").
|
| Seriously, Apple had to go out of their way to screw this up!
| Just tack the Unicode modifier character (e.g. U+0301) onto the
| end and run Unicode normalization! I get that you don't want
| this when you have dead keys doubling as normal keys, but
| dedicated dead keys (e.g. Alt+E) should just _always_ create
| the character you 're asking of them.
|
| Just let me set one of my modifier keys to a proper extensible
| compose key!!
| lkuty wrote:
| I am french speaking person and a programmer. I switched a year
| ago to qwerty and wish I had done so decades ago because the
| shortcuts in programs are conceived for qwert keyboards. I use
| karabiner and goku under macOS to produce accented characters.
| It is sufficiently fast to be usable.
| timeon wrote:
| > you can type << e >> but not << E >>
|
| There are QWERTY (and QWERTZ) keyboard that could do that. Like
| Czech or Slovak one.
| Oddskar wrote:
| Looks interesting. Definitely a step up from AZERTY which when
| I've looked at it seems to have been put together by someone who
| insists on holding French programmers back.
|
| This still puts a lot of emphasis on right-most part, which makes
| this quite unbalanced for programmers I think.
|
| Personally I would never go back to any layout that doesn't have
| a numpad and all special chars a programmer needs without moving
| the fingers 1 row up or down.
|
| Once one gets used to this everything else seems archaic.
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