It's the keyboard layout.

[Saber]

@Saber:  I like your 3.1b layout, and could definitely live with it.  for some reason, i'd prefer the LED buttons on the right hand side, but that's not a big deal.


i don't think it's bad that it's "German-centric", since German is the next highest language in the language poll after English.


i still think it's a bit "left weighted", since all your punctuation and symbols are over on the left.  I like how mine moves them around a bit, though arguably it's easier to see where things are on yours.


maybe ED can chime back into the discussion, to let us know if three shifts are a full constraint, among other things.  I have a feeling he's blocked us all, so he only sees a handful of replies on this thread

ED wrote what he wants in the first post, it's just people have ignored it and like wildfire, spread out in different directions. Two keyboard shift keys for starters is what one of the things he wanted. The rest is in black and white. 

As for being "left weighted", absolutely, as I've droned on and on before about, because to me it's obvious the keyboard modifier on the bottom right should be on the opposite side of those common symbols it produces for both thumbs to work in concurrence while in the hands. Right thumb on keyboard Fn so left thumb can press Z key for an /, then "back" to Spacebar(or Enter). Shoulder modifiers not necessarily a requirement. 

@Saber:  I like your 3.1b layout, and could definitely live with it.  for some reason, i'd prefer the LED buttons on the right hand side, but that's not a big deal.


i don't think it's bad that it's "German-centric", since German is the next highest language in the language poll after English.


i still think it's a bit "left weighted", since all your punctuation and symbols are over on the left.  I like how mine moves them around a bit, though arguably it's easier to see where things are on yours.


maybe ED can chime back into the discussion, to let us know if three shifts are a full constraint, among other things.  I have a feeling he's blocked us all, so he only sees a handful of replies on this thread

But yes, it would be nice if ED could give us some more directions, in particular about the number of Shifts (2 or 3), the "hardware buttons on top", the desirability  of "DOSBox compatible shift-pairs", and the balance between "clutter" and language support.

I agree but as I've said, ED has stated what he wants, in general, in the opening post and he's a very busy fellow these days. We'll have to do our part in the interim while his attention is elsewhere.

Although, since you've voiced your concerns about it multiple times, would you mind mapping another second "Right Shift" on to one of the Pandora's right corner keys, temporarily, then test that both Right Shifts work as they should for capitals, then further experiment here by pressing both of these Right Shifts together? If you or someone doesn't mind doing this, I'm interested if worlds will collide or nothing will happen.  

 

[bzar]

I want standard unix philosophy.

What do you mean by this? I can't seem to fit it anywhere within this context. Maybe we have different definitions for it? I tried to look it up on wikipedia to see if there's any that fit but couldn't find any.

 

[comradekingu]

Make each program key do one thing well. Right now there is something on tab, something on escape, something on the wheel (dont know what that does, but it isnt pause) There are two buttons with brightness up and down, i dont see the point, but if you do, dont make it F11 and F12.

Then there is meta, which does F-keys, shift-symbols, and altGr symbols, and dead-diactrics, the ◌'s people dont know about. Mostly because the compose, isnt marked at shift+space.

¤ does, something? The [` ◌˜] key seems out of place to me.

All in all, 2perkey isnt enough to get more meaningful efficiency out of a lot more languages. Its damaging to clarity in return for doing almost a lot of things.

wb:So scandinavia doesnt even get second rate support, but included greek and math. Greek, and math...

The way a compromise work/optimization math, is you make the most people happy, if you do something for them, without them all fighting against eachother.

It all trickles down from what you have, vs what you can incorporate.

Have english, incorporate german, have english and german, get scandinavia, spanish etc for free.

Then doing all US-intl dead-diactrics and a language-layer, you incorporate as much as possible, with no major hurdle for anyone.

We have geeks, we could do normal people. With simplicity in mind, that is possible.

saber: "Both hands working concurrently" is a misnormer. As for the weighing, or position of a, you are wrong in terms of english, and for the latter, wrong for anything else.

The only thing shift on the left accomplishes is typing up both hands, at opposite ends of the keyboard. It also means no meaningful combo-presses. With two shifts on keyboard, a key has gone to waste.

Edit: Doublewide, non-centered non-stabilized spacebar (-type key) is also a misnormer. The people who think its good, are not the one with insight into the matter.

 

[TrashyMG]

So scandinavia doesnt even get second rate support, but included greek and math. Greek, and math...

Well Math is known as the universal language.

 

[Saber]

So scandinavia doesnt even get second rate support, but included greek and math. Greek, and math...

Well Math is known as the universal language.

Always thought laughter and love were.

 

[Eight Bit]

So scandinavia doesnt even get second rate support, but included greek and math. Greek, and math...

Though a funny idea for the geeky device the pyra will be, I hope not

We discussed a little about this on irc but in my opinion it's about time Ed selects a few (not all) keyboards he likes from the proposals thread and makes a vote thread.

 

[_wb_]

OK Saber, let's look at that first post like bible scholars then.
 

As promised earlier in my news post, here is the thread about the keyboard layout.
 
First of all, thanks for all the discussions and threads you already had here at the boards - a few interesting ideas arose, and one came very close to what I had in mind.
 
Let's start with some facts first:

• The keyboard should be standard enough to be used by every normal user
• It should be balanced between text typing and coding
• It should have most of the keys a normal keyboard has (i.e. Pandora keyboard has issues with DosBox).
• The main languages used where the Pandora sold are English, French and German. It should support these languages as good as possible (with English being the main one)
• We should have a maximum of three characters per key: One with a single keypress, one with Shift and one with AltGr (which replaces the old Fn-Key)
• The most-used keys should get the best positions

The keyboard will have two different colored labels (so basically the same as the Pandora had).
Adding more colors will make things more expensive, and the keymat IS already more expensive because of the backlight.
 
Okay, of all the keyboard layouts I've seen at the threads you created, this seems to be nigh perfect in my opinion:
 

pU8hObm.png
 
What do I like about it?

• Mostly Standard QWERTY-Keyboard, including the Shift-Keys on the numbers
• Tab as a single key
• ä, ö and ü (German) as well as ' and ` (French) included
• Almost all normal characters are existant
• Even has two shift keys (useful for persons who don't use the shoulder buttons when typing, like myself

 
 
So ED said: "What do I like about it? [...] Even has two shift keys (useful for persons who don't use the shoulder buttons when typing, like myself "
 
Now, why would he use the word "even" if having two (actually three) shift keys would be a final decision that cannot be modified and is set in stone for now until eternity? Because in that case, it would not have been something optional that can be liked about your proposal, but it would have been a hard requirement that has to be satisfied before a proposal can be even considered at all.
 
Pretty early on in this thread, I made the following remarks about the extra shift key:
 

• If we have two shift keys on the keyboard AND a third shift on a shoulder button, things get confusing because no normal keyboard has THREE shift keys.
• We could make keyboard Shift sticky (like Fn on the Pandora) so it would not be particularly hard to type, say, capital W or S while holding it as a handheld and not using shoulder shift.
• I prefer to have one more dedicated key

 
Those arguments are still valid.

Although, since you've voiced your concerns about it multiple times, would you mind mapping another second "Right Shift" on to one of the Pandora's right corner keys, temporarily, then test that both Right Shifts work as they should for capitals, then further experiment here by pressing both of these Right Shifts together? If you or someone doesn't mind doing this, I'm interested if worlds will collide or nothing will happen.  

I am sure that we can find some way to make a three Shift approach work to some extent. Probably some applications will get confused when the two Right Shifts are pressed together (they might get stuck in a Shift Lock or something, but nothing more serious than that). Most likely we will not be able to let software distinguish between the three Shift keys (which is a pity because those keyboard Shift keys would be relatively good extra game keys), or if we do, then one of them will not behave like a Shift key some of the time.

But the technical issues are only a small part of why I don't want three Shifts. It's not just software that can get confused, it's also users. And even without the confusion, we still lose a key, just to solve a 'problem' that only applies to people who don't use the shoulder buttons (which is their loss if you ask me), and which can be solved in another way: keyboard shift can be made sticky just like Fn/AltGr/Meta/whatever.

Let's look at the rest of ED's first post:
 

What issues are there?

• Hard to type some key combinations like ALT-F4 (as you need to press ALT, ALTGr and 4 at the same time). Only used for old DOS-Games though
• ESC is not a single key. Would be nice to have it, but not mandatory (did work with the Pandora)
• Some keys missing: ', ° and ^.
  
• +, - and = is a bit too far in the middle (hard to reach for these common keys). Maybe we should move them with less used keys?

What I cannot tell is:
How is the layout for devving (vim, scripts, code, etc.)?
All needed characters there?
Can most used characters be easily reached or do we need to move around a bit?

What do you think?

Please post any issues and suggestions you have here - so we can rearrange everything a bit so it's useful for everyone.
But please do NOT post completely different keyboard layouts... we had a lot of those already.
Instead, post why you like a different one better and link to it on the existing threads.

And be rational - there is NO layout everyone loves. What we need to find is the best compromise for all users and usecases.

Thanks!

Your layout hasn't taken most of those remarks into account. You still don't have a dedicated Esc key. You added acute and circumflex (which is good), but not °  (not that that's a huge problem). Your - and + are still in the same position as always. So I think you have ignored some opportunities to improve your proposal.

ED said: "The main languages used where the Pandora sold are English, French and German. It should support these languages as good as possible (with English being the main one)"

Note that he says "English, French and German", not "English and German".

In French, the letter é has a frequency of 1.504%. In German, the letters ä ö ß together have a frequency of 1.328% (ä: 0.578%, ö: 0.443%, ß:0.307%). If you want to support French better, it would be best to have an easier way to type é than [dead acute] E. That is the minimum for French. Otherwise it would be like typing German with only a dead umlaut.

I would also add à (frequency: 0.486%) and perhaps è (frequency: 0.271%). A dedicated ç is not really needed for French (frequency: 0.085%), but having a dead cedilla diacritic is nice (faster than Compose sequences). Dedicated ç is useful though for Portuguese (0.530%) and Turkish (1.156%), but then again Turkish also needs ş at 1.780%, so a dead cedilla diacritic covers more.

I like these words from ED:

"And be rational - there is NO layout everyone loves. What we need to find is the best compromise for all users and usecases."

and that's exactly what we have been trying to do: in a rational way, finding the best possible compromise for all users [restricted to the Western, Latin-script based part of the world] and usecases [natural language, coding, command line, gaming, scientific stuff].

 

[ible]

I would say I'm one of the few(?) who might make use of mathematical symbols (though obviously latex is the go-to for that sort of thing).

I would also like to support French if possible. But I don't use it, so I don't know which layout I'd prefer most based on that. In my layouts, however, that requires only one keyboard shift; though I suppose I could move a few things around (kill some German symbols like section sign in the dual keyboard shift layout).

 

[comradekingu]

Lets make it a french that french people can understand.

 

[_wb_]

Make each program key do one thing well. Right now there is something on tab, something on escape, something on the wheel (dont know what that does, but it isnt pause) There are two buttons with brightness up and down, i dont see the point, but if you do, dont make it F11 and F12.

Then there is meta, which does F-keys, shift-symbols, and altGr symbols, and dead-diactrics, the ◌'s people dont know about. Mostly because the compose, isnt marked at shift+space.

¤ does, something? The [` ◌˜] key seems out of place to me.

All in all, 2perkey isnt enough to get more meaningful efficiency out of a lot more languages. Its damaging to clarity in return for doing almost a lot of things.

wb:So scandinavia doesnt even get second rate support, but included greek and math. Greek, and math...

"Make each key do one thing well" sounds like a very silly idea. Even full-size keyboards don't do that, e.g. the number row contains both numbers and symbols, each of those keys do at least two things.

My latest proposal does get meaningful efficiency gains in a lot of languages. German obviously. But also French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Finnish.

Many people expect to have to use dead diacritics for many of their letters. There simply does not exist a keyboard that has all the letters used in French (àâçéèêëîïôœù) as dedicated keys. Same with Spanish (áéíóúüñ), Portuguese (ãâáàçêéíóõúü) and Dutch (áàäéèêëíïóöúü). Italian keyboards have lowercase-only àèéìòù, but I'm pretty sure that they would be fine with dedicated àèé (which can be used in upper case too!) and dead grave.

I am sorry about not including Å Æ Ø while still including a "dead greek" key, but keep in mind that the Greek letters are not only used by Greek people (even though Greece has a larger population than any Scandinavian country, so don't dismiss them too quickly!), and that it only takes up 1 key, while Å Æ Ø take 3 keys. Also I think that having an ÜÖÄ cluster to remap things to is "good enough" for most Scandinavians (especially the Finnish, who only really need ÖÄ). I don't think separately labeled Å Æ Ø keys would be a huge improvement for Scandinavians, especially since there is no way to arrange their relative positions in a way that makes the Norwegians, the Danish and the Swedish all happy at the same time.

 

[_wb_]

I would say I'm one of the few(?) who might make use of mathematical symbols (though obviously latex is the go-to for that sort of thing).

If the Pyra community is like the Pandora community, then I suspect that you wouldn't be the only one. And of course LaTeX beats a simplistic Unicode-based approach to write neat formulas, but there are lots of settings where LaTeX is not really available: e.g. on these boards, or on IRC, or in LibreOffice, or in an email, or even in a code comment. While nowadays, Unicode is available everywhere.

 

[Saber]

OK Saber, let's look at that first post like bible scholars then.

As promised earlier in my news post, here is the thread about the keyboard layout.


First of all, thanks for all the discussions and threads you already had here at the boards - a few interesting ideas arose, and one came very close to what I had in mind.


Let's start with some facts first:

• The keyboard should be standard enough to be used by every normal user
• It should be balanced between text typing and coding
• It should have most of the keys a normal keyboard has (i.e. Pandora keyboard has issues with DosBox).
• The main languages used where the Pandora sold are English, French and German. It should support these languages as good as possible (with English being the main one)
• We should have a maximum of three characters per key: One with a single keypress, one with Shift and one with AltGr (which replaces the old Fn-Key)
• The most-used keys should get the best positions

The keyboard will have two different colored labels (so basically the same as the Pandora had).
Adding more colors will make things more expensive, and the keymat IS already more expensive because of the backlight.


Okay, of all the keyboard layouts I've seen at the threads you created, this seems to be nigh perfect in my opinion:

pU8hObm.png


What do I like about it?

• Mostly Standard QWERTY-Keyboard, including the Shift-Keys on the numbers
• Tab as a single key
• ä, ö and ü (German) as well as ' and ` (French) included
• Almost all normal characters are existant
• Even has two shift keys (useful for persons who don't use the shoulder buttons when typing, like myself

So ED said: "What do I like about it? [...] Even has two shift keys (useful for persons who don't use the shoulder buttons when typing, like myself "


Now, why would he use the word "even" if having two (actually three) shift keys would be a final decision that cannot be modified and is set in stone for now until eternity? Because in that case, it would not have been something optional that can be liked about your proposal, but it would have been a hard requirement that has to be satisfied before a proposal can be even considered at all.


Pretty early on in this thread, I made the following remarks about the extra shift key:

• If we have two shift keys on the keyboard AND a third shift on a shoulder button, things get confusing because no normal keyboard has THREE shift keys.
• We could make keyboard Shift sticky (like Fn on the Pandora) so it would not be particularly hard to type, say, capital W or S while holding it as a handheld and not using shoulder shift.
• I prefer to have one more dedicated key

Those arguments are still valid.

Although, since you've voiced your concerns about it multiple times, would you mind mapping another second "Right Shift" on to one of the Pandora's right corner keys, temporarily, then test that both Right Shifts work as they should for capitals, then further experiment here by pressing both of these Right Shifts together? If you or someone doesn't mind doing this, I'm interested if worlds will collide or nothing will happen.  

I am sure that we can find some way to make a three Shift approach work to some extent. Probably some applications will get confused when the two Right Shifts are pressed together (they might get stuck in a Shift Lock or something, but nothing more serious than that). Most likely we will not be able to let software distinguish between the three Shift keys (which is a pity because those keyboard Shift keys would be relatively good extra game keys), or if we do, then one of them will not behave like a Shift key some of the time.

But the technical issues are only a small part of why I don't want three Shifts. It's not just software that can get confused, it's also users. And even without the confusion, we still lose a key, just to solve a 'problem' that only applies to people who don't use the shoulder buttons (which is their loss if you ask me), and which can be solved in another way: keyboard shift can be made sticky just like Fn/AltGr/Meta/whatever.

Let's look at the rest of ED's first post:

What issues are there?

• Hard to type some key combinations like ALT-F4 (as you need to press ALT, ALTGr and 4 at the same time). Only used for old DOS-Games though
• ESC is not a single key. Would be nice to have it, but not mandatory (did work with the Pandora)
• Some keys missing: ', ° and ^.
  
• +, - and = is a bit too far in the middle (hard to reach for these common keys). Maybe we should move them with less used keys?

What I cannot tell is:
How is the layout for devving (vim, scripts, code, etc.)?


All needed characters there?


Can most used characters be easily reached or do we need to move around a bit?


What do you think?


Please post any issues and suggestions you have here - so we can rearrange everything a bit so it's useful for everyone.


But please do NOT post completely different keyboard layouts... we had a lot of those already.


Instead, post why you like a different one better and link to it on the existing threads.


And be rational - there is NO layout everyone loves. What we need to find is the best compromise for all users and usecases.


Thanks!

Your layout hasn't taken most of those remarks into account. You still don't have a dedicated Esc key. You added acute and circumflex (which is good), but not °  (not that that's a huge problem). Your - and + are still in the same position as always. So I think you have ignored some opportunities to improve your proposal.

ED said: "The main languages used where the Pandora sold are English, French and German. It should support these languages as good as possible (with English being the main one)"

Note that he says "English, French and German", not "English and German".

In French, the letter é has a frequency of 1.504%. In German, the letters ä ö ß together have a frequency of 1.328% (ä: 0.578%, ö: 0.443%, ß:0.307%). If you want to support French better, it would be best to have an easier way to type é than [dead acute] E. That is the minimum for French. Otherwise it would be like typing German with only a dead umlaut.

I would also add à (frequency: 0.486%) and perhaps è (frequency: 0.271%). A dedicated ç is not really needed for French (frequency: 0.085%), but having a dead cedilla diacritic is nice (faster than Compose sequences). Dedicated ç is useful though for Portuguese (0.530%) and Turkish (1.156%), but then again Turkish also needs ş at 1.780%, so a dead cedilla diacritic covers more.

I like these words from ED:

"And be rational - there is NO layout everyone loves. What we need to find is the best compromise for all users and usecases."

and that's exactly what we have been trying to do: in a rational way, finding the best possible compromise for all users [restricted to the Western, Latin-script based part of the world] and usecases [natural language, coding, command line, gaming, scientific stuff].

I think what's really being compromised is the layout, by this "just cause" of injecting it with everything as counted useful, for almost all users, all at once. This unfocus is irrational in my eyes because it restricts nothing and burdens everyone to carry around with them this abundance for the "greater good".  

As for multiple keyboard Shifts, I'm guessing I'm one of the few who looks at the right keyboard Shift key as user remappable, if so wished. SysRq, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Escape, Compose, Degree, Yen, and any number of others could usurp it, if the user likes. 

BTW, my favorite layout is v3.0 in my sig below. 3.1 and 3.1b are offshoots of it for ED to examine and piece his final layout from, if he wants.

 

[_wb_]

I think what's really being compromised is the layout, by this "just cause" of injecting it with everything as counted useful, for almost all users, all at once. This unfocus is irrational in my eyes because it restricts nothing and burdens everyone to carry around with them this abundance for the "greater good".

There is certainly a trade-off to be made between "burdening everyone" with symbols they don't need and having better support for some languages.

In my proposal, for example, you could take away the ÜÖÄ labels and let the Germans remember it, or let them use dead umlaut (¨+U for Ü, etc).

Something like this: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/8958654749b762982af71a7397a62bac

"Less is more", in a sense, because every label is a restriction. In fact, we could strip things down all the way down to an empty keymat, so we don't impose anything at all and people are free to use QWERTZ or AZERTY or whatever they want.

I personally think labels can be useful though, and the "burden" of one Meta-symbol per key is not too much. After all, why have a keyboard backlight otherwise?

As for multiple keyboard Shifts, I'm guessing I'm one of the few who looks at the right keyboard Shift key as user remappable, if so wished. SysRq, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Escape, Compose, Degree, Yen, and any number of others could usurp it, if the user likes. 

Right. And then hope that you didn't accidentally map your shoulder button to ¥

 

[Saber]

I think what's really being compromised is the layout, by this "just cause" of injecting it with everything as counted useful, for almost all users, all at once. This unfocus is irrational in my eyes because it restricts nothing and burdens everyone to carry around with them this abundance for the "greater good".

There is certainly a trade-off to be made between "burdening everyone" with symbols they don't need and having better support for some languages.

In my proposal, for example, you could take away the ÜÖÄ labels and let the Germans remember it, or let them use dead umlaut (¨+U for Ü, etc).

Something like this: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/8958654749b762982af71a7397a62bac

"Less is more", in a sense, because every label is a restriction. In fact, we could strip things down all the way down to an empty keymat, so we don't impose anything at all and people are free to use QWERTZ or AZERTY or whatever they want.

Actually, less is never ever more. It's always less. It we are talking of efficiency and clarity, the objective, then more extras will bog down the process, but some of us need to know where the line delineates. 

 

[ible]

Lets make it a french that french people can understand.

I don't think your layout makes things any more understandable; it sacrifices too much to be clean (no diacritic stuff is clear, remapping is required, number row is too cluttered, bad modifier support on the keyboard).  We have a reduced set of keys, and this (or _wb_'s layout, since it rearranges it) would have excellent support for french, while being clear and easy to understand.

 

[Saber]

As for multiple keyboard Shifts, I'm guessing I'm one of the few who looks at the right keyboard Shift key as user remappable, if so wished. SysRq, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Escape, Compose, Degree, Yen, and any number of others could usurp it, if the user likes. 

Right. And then hope that you didn't accidentally map your shoulder button to ¥

Here's your opportunity to test the truth of this(and putting an end to this crying wolf game). Remap one of your right side Pandora keyboard keys to another Right Shift. Then press both Right Shift keys together. What happens? Reassign keyboard Right Shift with the Yen. What happens now? 

 

[alanjf]

Its suddenly different because french uses too many letters to make that happen in the ordinary way. Italian has sort of the same issue,


because they have two diactriced letters on the same key.


Not that they shouldnt be able to do that, but for interlingual purposes, ive tried to do away with any such hacks. One modifier to do special language,


+1 modifier to do big letters special language.


Unfortunately we have not that many keys, so the least hacky way i found to do it was to use start and start+select. Its not ideal, but it has way less


caveats than putting ctrl on select and alt on start.

I still don't see why pressing Shift (or Caps-Lock) to get upper case French letters is a problem. Like I said when I was staying in France I recall having no issue with that.

 

[sebt3]

I still don't see why pressing Shift (or Caps-Lock) to get upper case French letters is a problem.

But you werent using the affected keys, were you ? On a regular french keyboard pressing "É", "È" or "À" is not possible. Yet it's doable on a french-canadian keyboard (like the one I'm using here)

 

[_wb_]

Its suddenly different because french uses too many letters to make that happen in the ordinary way. Italian has sort of the same issue,


because they have two diactriced letters on the same key.


Not that they shouldnt be able to do that, but for interlingual purposes, ive tried to do away with any such hacks. One modifier to do special language,


+1 modifier to do big letters special language.


Unfortunately we have not that many keys, so the least hacky way i found to do it was to use start and start+select. Its not ideal, but it has way less


caveats than putting ctrl on select and alt on start.

I still don't see why pressing Shift (or Caps-Lock) to get upper case French letters is a problem. Like I said when I was staying in France I recall having no issue with that.

A standard French keyboard in France looks like this:

Shift+ éèçàù produces not ÉÈÇÀÙ but 2790% on an AZERTY keyboard. Also note that all the shift symbol pairs are different than US-QWERTY (except =+), Keyboards layouts can be weird. For example, the French keyboard has dollar sign ($) as a primary (unshifted) key -- why?

Also it has period (.) only as a shift symbol, while semicolon ( and exclamation mark (!) are primary keys. I wonder if French people think it is more important to build long sentences and to shout than to end sentences with normal period.

Many standard keyboards are a bit weird in terms of shifted letters with diacritics. The Italian and the Swiss keyboards are even worse than the French one in that respect.

 

[comradekingu]

It is the country that made SECAM and ISDN. Trust the french to do something special. And yes, the country-denominator is warranted in this regard.

Importantly the lower case variants of those keys are on 2790 on a french keyboard, so they should be on the pyra aswell. It will unfortunately be one modifier away, since laziness cant be afforded with less keys. They are only that important to the french, and to the whole community, there are more important things to have in standard ways.

With that same modifier, which i propose on a dedicated select, since that is uncumbered it is possible to also do the higher-case variants. With all major western europa covered. (where the pandora sold any units, and where the pyra can hope to sell any, which is a bit more)

Albeit you will have to learn where the extra letters for your langauge are, since its a semi-new thing, and they are obviously hidden. For interlingual use, its very nice, because its always available.

Spoiler

AltGr has this functionality by default in a lot of places, but doing an overall with that by default is problematic since many people have different expextations about what it does by default

for them. I for example, as a Norseman, expect to be able to type ð to write old-norse/icelandic

I think that is a good compromise, and it does away with the need for caps-lock. I think ctrl+shift, like on NeXt computers, is good if you insist on doing it the standard way. The reason is because we cant waste a key on a way to type that is marginal (french, italian) as opposed to English, german, and at the same time is inefficient.
 

Make each program key do one thing well.

 
--- sounds like a very silly idea. Even full-size keyboards don't do that, e.g. the number row contains both numbers and symbols, each of those keys do at least two things.
 
My latest proposal does get meaningful efficiency gains in a lot of languages. German obviously. But also French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Finnish.
 
Many people expect to have to use dead diacritics for many of their letters. There simply does not exist a keyboard that has all the letters used in French (àâçéèêëîïôœù) as dedicated keys. Same with Spanish (áéíóúüñ), Portuguese (ãâáàçêéíóõúü) and Dutch (áàäéèêëíïóöúü). Italian keyboards have lowercase-only àèéìòù, but I'm pretty sure that they would be fine with dedicated àèé (which can be used in upper case too!) and dead grave.
 
I am sorry about not including Å Æ Ø while still including a "dead greek" key, but keep in mind that the Greek letters are not only used by Greek people (even though Greece has a larger population than any Scandinavian country, so don't dismiss them too quickly!), and that it only takes up 1 key, while Å Æ Ø take 3 keys. Also I think that having an ÜÖÄ cluster to remap things to is "good enough" for most Scandinavians (especially the Finnish, who only really need ÖÄ). I don't think separately labeled Å Æ Ø keys would be a huge improvement for Scandinavians, especially since there is no way to arrange their relative positions in a way that makes the Norwegians, the Danish and the Swedish all happy at the same time.

The only way around doing shift layers, is having a keyboard that is 3 times as big, which is again inefficient as a keyboard, because you will have to learn positions on a bigger keyboard, and move your hands more.

Mixing modifiers with letters, is ugly, and it breaks with convention and expectancy. Yes putting [ ] on letters that are close to the [ ] key is in many ways good, but its far from equivalent.

The greeks dont have money to buy 500€ handhelds. That is the reality. They didnt with the pandora, they wont now. And their alphabet/keyboard convention doesnt fit. So even if they did, it would be a sub-optimal sale for what is mostly a burden on everyone.

Italian, Spanish, and French have both dedicated keys for letters, and diactrics, the latter with dedicated keys too. Doing compose, which is second rate to begin with, in a non-dedicated way, with non-conventional symbols, is just not answering the question for any of them. Its at best ok for interlingual use.

Dedicated keys, for dedicated letters, and language-modifiers, as per standard keyboard layout, is a goal. Yes having these keys in some other way, somewhere else, is a benefit over not having them at all, but its a joke compared to a real keyboard/typewriter.

Position is typing, thats how you know how to type. Yes there is a use in having labels, for making the treshold of entry lower, and accept a more wide userbase, but changing position and concepts has proven to be extremely prone to mass market failure in terms of keyboards.