Hi, I'm from France and interested into keyboards not for their look, feel or taste, but for the ergonomic of their layout.
In june 2017 I participated to the French's Afnor (national norm regulator) for improving the ancient 'azerty' layout to propose improvements to make it more "up to date". Understand, largely more "programmer friendly" which the 'qwerty' keyboard is already (mostly about opening and closing tags).
However I also formalized an old project of mine about an "almost" universal keyboard that would be easier for everybody (even non computer users) to apprehend and use. I designed the layout online in my gist for everyone to review :
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/a64eae70f4f459e1325f92014f825195 (CFILORUX)
The main motivation is to not be sticking to some local language specificities, but use an alphabet ordered keyboard. To avoid colliding fingers and using both hands, I used column based layout instead of row based, separated into two 'banks', one for each hand. I placed between the two banks all the dead keys that should allow the creation of all accent characters.
Btw, your favorite input method should help to propose you the right localized version of words as you type them.
I also started to work on a 4 rows 3 cols variant with a complete numpad in AltGr (with side effect of having almost all vowels on the top row) :
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/c2ca5f0f7dc0f5527d60b11fadf26018 (AEIMQUY)
If people wants to provide me with suggestions, improvements and tips to have this keyboard made into a real product (wasd or max ?) you are free to do so. Should I open another topic in a more suitable section of the forum to discuss about it ?
Kochise
