Hey,
I ordered my Ergodox in the last Massdrop buy, while waiting I've been playing with layouts and figuring out how to map an Icelandic keyboard.
I work as a hybrid developer/sysadmin so I expect I'll continue to use regular QWERTY keyboards quite frequently, mostly English/ANSI but also Icelandic/ISO.
My initial reaction was to start with QWERTY but then I stopped and thought, well if I'm retraining myself and I don't want to screw up my current typing skills perhaps going with something even more different isn't a bad idea and since bigger the difference the less chance of confusion and QWERTY is suboptimal for typing comfort, speed and accuracy.
I figured this might be a good time to switch to Dvorak, well I looked at Dvorak and making an Icelandic layout for it, also looked at how programming would be with a Dvorak and, ahh well not so great.
After doing a lot of experiments using
Patrick Gillespie's Keyboard Layout Analyzer I finally settled on a slightly modified Colemak layout, the only real difference was to swap the A and the N so that all the vowels would be on the right side, this way I can add the
Diacritic on the left hand to type
áúíýóé ö easily.
My Current Massdrop Ergodox layoutWith Icelandic characters, standard overlay:
But ideally I would like to make something that's not only usable for most or all Latin based languages but pretty fast for all of them. The
Colemak layout can already handle almost all the characters required but they involve some pretty
awkward key combinations like
Altgr + t + y to get
ý.Right now I'm thinking if it's possible to reprogram the CTRL, SHIFT and ALT and Layer keys so that in addition to being regular control keys they also become dead keys when pressed and released without any other key being pressed, this way I could add support for
° ´ ` ~ ˆ , pressing any one of them twice would result in the double diacritic or reversing the direction
ˆ becomes
ˇ and
° becomes
¨.
This leaves one deadkey that I think can be used for
ß Æ Þ Ð Ø and ¿¿ is a deadkey followed by
?Ø is a deadkey followed by
Oß is a deadkey followed by
SÆ is a deadkey followed by
AÞ is deadkey followed by
TÐ is deadkey followed by
D.
This could also be used for other secondary double mappings not involving the already used A and O.