Not fond of the layout at all, but it's always interesting to have more ideas discussed... No doubt it'll meet some people requirements.
If you're interested into why I'm not fond of the layout, it's because
- as a programmer, moving symbols even farther seems unpractical (even more if you need two keys to use them), the worst being +
- numbers are only on right keypad?
- not fond of systematic use of dead keys (see below), even more when the most useful one to me isn't even directly available
- not a fan of smaller keys
- I still think caps lock is useful (though I have hard times properly making it work in my keyboard firmware)
(and not fond of flat, untented, single-block ortholinear layout)
So definitively not for me, I even prefer current AZERTY (which I don't like that much), let alone some improved layouts. Still, again, I respect the work, and the discussion is interesting.
The target are all kind of keyboard users, the layout is optimized for:
- Typists (chat)
- Gamers
- Desktop/internet users
- Programmers
Not totally sure you can "optimize" a keyboard for several kind of usages and several languages. It's a bit different than making all characters available... I don't even use the same layout depending on the task I do (programming or normal typing), and I like it that way.
I'm curious... are you actually a programmer? Did I miss a + somewhere or the only one is truly on the far right? Is this an oversight?
My opinion would be that a keyboard layout is heavily linked to a language, and "one fits all" is not the way to go. In fact, I don't even think a programmer or a typist have the same kind of requirements.
My dream would be a way to be able to properly fit third-party keyboard on laptops (ergodox-like layout on a laptop would be so far better than current offerings...)
And I personally found that it's mistake, dead key should be the only way to generate accent letter because it is much flexible than accent letter printed.
I'm not sure I totally agree, given the frequency of some accentuated letters. You were referring to french, where "é" for example is over 2%, more than nearly half of the letters... People won't want to use dead keys for that.
Though I admit I moved most accentuated letters (except é and è, and the latter may move) on a different layer myself, and made dead accents available in case I need a foreign character (while I still don't use it for normal french accent, I prefer a Alt-gr-like modifier to half a dozen dead keys, except for ^).
That's why French government want to rework the French Keyboard to be able to access to all accent letters used in French.
There's not a single chance that a french keyboard would see é, è, à and ç (and possibly ù) disappear from a layout, replaced by dead accents. In fact, they could ADD one, which is on bépo (ê)
The reason the french government is (was?) discussing this is
1) Buzz
2) ...
...
487) Actual issues:
- there's characters actually IMPOSSIBLE to type on a french AZERTY, such as É (shift-é gives 2, no dead acute even if there's a dead grave!) or œ/Œ (even if some keyboard layouts have it hidden somewhere)
- home row is used less that top row, which is ergonomically bad*
If they design one (though I can see Bépo winning this, and not selling in commercial products, so we get a statu-quo), you'll most probably see accentuated letters earning an actual key so that you can use shift on it.
*not that AZERTY isn't optimized, but it's optimized FOR MECHANICAL TYPEWRITERS, where the top row needs less force than "home" row (it's also optimized for rolls, not alternating hands, which is a matter of taste). Actually, just switching top and home rows may improve things at small cost.
The respective monogram frequencies are 1.3–1.8 %, while the most common bigrams are 'en', 'de' and 'er', each with >2 %. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have dedicated keys for these bigrams then?
That's something I thought about... and it's not that a great idea when you look into it, IMHO.
Let alone the fact that "é" in french for example is more common than most bigrams, (and that you should get rid of half a dozen normal characters before the accentuated characters if you go strict %), I see two issues:
- if you introduce bigrams, assume you press the wrong key and it happens to be a bigram, you need to press backspace twice. I'm not sure it's great to have a "I missed the key"-key that depend on the key you pressed (firmware solutions are worse)
- common bigrams use common letters, which are easy to reach, usually on the home row of an optimized layout. Often optimized for rolls or alternating hands too (depending on preferences). Dead accent are usually not that easily reached (here a small key two rows above) and need to be followed by a letter on a completely different place (typically home row).
Ok, but sorry if this keyboard not fit for Swedish, you must understand that this keyboard support 44 languages and it's fair difficult to make all happy (except English people ).
You're under the risk to make noone unhappy, but noone happy either.
Unless you target international hotels (they have some fancy international keyboards sometimes), but that's a limited market.
The Bios has its own system, it's independant of the OS, we cannot modify the Keyboard Driver Layout of Bios, that's why you will have a QWERTY layout (seem the standard layout for BIOS).
Well, nothing prevents you from sending the "correct" keycodes, as long as the character is available in QWERTY layout, you can make it work in a QWERTY bios without requiring any driver.