AltGr curiosity (on HHKB?)

[AndrewZorn]

Tried Googling.

I finally pinned down the behavior of AltGr on my HHKB in this one situation.  It reminds me a lot of what was frustrating me with my AutoHotkey HHKB layout (pushing twice, getting two results).

If you could please, tell me what happens when you do the following, because this seems odd:

AltGr + \ = (nothing, but push a key after, and you get *[key], do it twice, get **)
AltGr + ` = (nothing, but push a key after, and you get ~[key], do it twice, get ~~)
AltGr + \ THEN ` = ≈

Isn't this strange?  Didn't really notice until I started to do things OTHER than just holding AltGr and doing all the rows to see what I got.

Which I will now do, in case anyone has MORE different stuff.  Mine does not agree with Wikipedia, and I feel like I used to get different symbols in some places.

-Normal-
¡ºª¢€ħðþ‘’–×≈
äåãø˛đłúüö«»
á`´¨ˇñéíóõ
æ^çœ˘˚¯¸˙¿

-Shift-
¹²³£¥ĦÐÞ“”—÷~~
ÄÅÃØ~ĐŁÚÜÖ‹›
Á~~˝~~ÑÉÍÓÕ
Æ~ÇŒ~~~~~~

After doing those though, I now notice a LOT of keys that do nothing, print nothing... but pushing the NEXT key spits out two characters!

Maybe I just need a tutorial.

[Rajagra]

Seems to be Colemak doing that.

[AndrewZorn]

Yes, it is... looks like \ is a character used to start off to get many different characters.

[ds26gte]

Yes, it is... looks like \ is a character used to start off to get many different characters.

For Mac OS X users, note that the corresponding keychord is opt-' not opt-\ as you might reasonably infer.  (Here opt is the Mac equivalent of AltGr.)

I had to find this out by bumbling, as the Colemak site says AltGr-\ is to be used for both Win and Mac.  (In any case, the Colemak.layout distributed there contradicts this spec.)

A good way to find out the goodies Colemak has to offer on the Mac is to Show Keyboard Viewer.  My one misgiving is that when you switch from Qwerty to Colemak, quite a few of the special characters available via opt in Qwerty are gone.  I particularly miss Ω -- there is no Colemak keychoard for this character.  (In Qwerty, it is opt-z.)  Colemak thus doesn't support SI units.  Nevertheless, I found it irresistible.