[pwiecz]

Unfortunately both Alts are not equivalent. The right one, the AltGr is uaef in many languages to type letters with diacritics. E.g. in Polish AltGr+Z is Ż, while AltGr+X is Ź. Still using both Ctrls itself helps a lot, and one may have a right Windows to remap as Meta.

[layer8]

They are equivalent in the US layout, which doesn’t have AltGr. For software developers, the US layout is the most ergonomic, and I’d recommend using a Compose key for diacritics and such (I use the Caps Lock key as the Compose key). I’m not from the US, so no home bias here. :)

[vladvasiliu]

That can be fixed outside of Windows [0].

What you're looking for, is a ISO Level 3 Shift (at least as far as X11 is concerned. Don't know the terms on windows).

I configured my keyboard to use the WIN keys as that. Super I only use for window-management related things, which I don't use is all the time and I can configure the actions to be on my right-hand. Therefore, since CAPS is useless, I remapped it to Super.

This way, with the dead keys, you can create many composed symbols. For writing French, an US layout is perfect, and I can type as fast as on a French keyboard. For your particular case, I don't know how to create the Ż, but Lvl3 + e + Z -> Ź. It's likely that if you used a different layout, this would be possible.

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[0] I've tried multiple times to get a keyboard layout like on a mac, with its deadkeys system, but never managed to remap the AltGr properly.

[CmdrKrool]

It might be good if keyboards were more symmetrical in general. Perhaps the Enter key could be in the middle, below the space bar, instead of on the right which might come from a vestigial bias towards left-to-right languages.

This is the closest thing I found just now by googling, though by similarly 'directional' reasoning I think Del and Backspace don't belong in the central column and should be on opposite sides: https://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/truly-ergonomic-227-mech...

[rgoulter]

> Perhaps the Enter key could be in the middle, ... Yes, such keyboards exist.

As well as enter/backspace/delete, it's also useful to have esc/tab near spacebar. https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku

e.g. A popular off-the-shelf keyboard which supports this layout https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/

> ...below the space bar

Well. Then you'd need to move your hands, or stretch your fingers a bit. It's better to have a smaller spacebar key, to allow for extra keys.

[msla]

Another possible solution is to define a compose key (I use SysRq) to type characters not on the keyboard, such that (for example) the three-key sequence "SysRq . Z" is Ż.

Here's the XCompose file I use:

https://github.com/kragen/xcompose