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by scrollaway 3429 days ago
I made my own layout years ago. I'm french and for years I typed on an azerty keyboard. When I switched to Qwerty, I found I really disliked the position of the m key. So I changed it.

Then I changed a few more keys so I could have easier access to them for programming. All the punctuation as well as putting some common unicode glyphs on altgr.

This is the end result: Drix EU Latin.

https://github.com/jleclanche/dotfiles/blob/master/X11/xkb/s...

It's an xkb file, only tested on Linux. I literally install it by replacing `/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us` with this file. (There's probably a better way nowadays, but back then the way was "submit your layout to X11 and get it merged in". I didn't want to do that.)

If you find dvorak too hard, maybe give this a shot. It should be self-evident how to move glyphs around as the file is well-commented. I find non-qwerty-like layouts to be a waste of time, to be honest, compared to studying how you yourself type and moving the keys you find problematic/out of reach.
1 comments
zokier 3429 days ago
That is similar to (if bit more extreme) what I've done too. It is truly baffling how bad European layouts are, especially for programming etc. But because my native language(s) have couple of accented characters, I couldn't just switch to US layout. So I ended up transplanting those characters to US layout, which required shuffling few things around. Overall I'm pretty happy with the end result, even if it is still "just qwerty". Some things could be tweaked bit more in altgr layer but that is fairly minor thing. It is especially nice that I can fairly easily use US layout if necessary.

http://zokier.net/stuff/nappaimisto.png looks like this old picture is somewhat out of date, but shows still the basic idea.

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scrollaway 3429 days ago
Hah, nice! Do you use dead accents? I found it super useful to put all the dead `´^¨° on my altgr-shift-12345 in order to make any accented letter I might want. I use that instead of éèä etc as there's a bunch of variations of it in french, but I don't need them often enough.

This also proved really useful when I started writing in swedish and had quick access to å without having to switch layout.

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zokier 3429 days ago
No, I made the principal decision to have no dead keys. Your idea to have both dead and non-dead variations seems pretty neat, that didn't occur to me when I was doing my layout. I might steal that if I'll end up reworking the layout at some point.

Funnily enough, Å was the one key I pushed from unmodified access to altgr layer because I have so little use for it :)

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