Neelix
Insecticidal Maniac
My proposed layout has 17 unlabelled Meta keys, and still has all your dead-keys in place. I only count 9 specific Alt-Gr symbols in that polish layout, so creating an optimised layout including them all should be no problem. My suggestion is not to try to replicate the Alt-Gr layouts of the specific regions, as obviously the placement of the static portion of the meta layer would block that, rather it is to allow people in different regions to have a layout that is tailored to that region.But an AltGr layer gives you the biggest possible "dynamic area", since every single key is available: all letters, all numbers, all punctuation symbols, etc. Take the example of Polish:The point is to optimise the dynamic area for specific languages. That might mean putting certain letters at different places to where you would put them in the default combined layout. If you have them printed somewhere other than where they are mapped that creates confusion.
There is no way, even if you arrange the missing US-QWERTY keys on Meta and Shift+Meta in the most compact way, to accommodate something like the above just by assigning new Meta actions to unlabeled Meta keys.
You've said it yourself, different languages have different letter frequencies for the same letters, so they have different priorities for the letters they have in common. In some regions Meta+A might be the optimal position for Ä, in other regions it would make more sense to have À there.Also, I don't see much reason to put letters that are already labeled at different places than where they already are in the combined layout. Would ÜÖÄ at Meta+UOA or at Meta+OKL (or where would you put them if you were a German?) really be much better than at Meta+FCV, where they happen to be now in my proposal? I don't think so. I think the main thing you want to do is add new letters (currently unlabeled). And for that, the AltGr layer is a better option than adding stuff into the Meta layer.
You can, and perhaps some users would want to take advantage of that. I wouldn't recommend it for the default layouts though. The idea here is to have some predefined regional layouts and to allow the user to select a regional layout on first boot, (later switchable though the configbutton applet) optimised for their region.Keep in mind that we can have both Meta and AltGr at a shoulder button. Together with Shift that means you can have up to eight symbols per key if you want, all efficiently chordable using just one thumb press. I propose to make a good default for the first four layers (primary, Shifted, Meta and Shift+Meta), where only two or three layers are printed per key: I would say three for the number row (primary numbers, shifted symbols, Meta F-keys) and two for the letter keys (primary (uppercase/lowercase is implicit) and Meta), to keep it visually clean. For the next four layers (AltGr, Shift+AltGr, Meta+AltGr and Shift+Meta+AltGr), US-International would be a good default, but it does not need to be labeled, and I would disable the AltGr behavior of R_Alt by default (since it makes Alt+letter menu shortcuts impossible), using R_Ctrl + R_Alt instead as the default AltGr mechanism.
- Neelix
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