Eight Bit
Hardcore Member
Thanks for the feedback.I like the concept of your layout (it's more or less an extension of the Pandora layout, with fixes for what was just wrong on the Pandora), but in my opinion it has too many arbitrary symbols that most people don't need at all: ± ¢ § ¶ µ ¥ £ ß and dead cedilla / dead ring are things that are just too arbitrary and unimportant (in my opinion) to deserve getting a label on the keymat. Dead cedilla is not very useful since those who need it will rather map a dedicated Ç (and perhaps Ş) somewhere. Same for dead ring: if you need that, you will rather map a dedicated Å somewhere. All of those currency symbols, I wonder who really uses all of those. Even if you do stuff with different currencies professionally or something, you're probably rather going to use abbreviations like USD and GBP than those symbols.Sorry, My revised keyboard layout... I got some feedback and there was still room for improvement
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/bdf33daff649f278104e533af4530f3f
It hurt my feelings to have to take the ß away from the S key and put it next to the B but I had to for consistancy in block dividing...
Hopefully you find it complete, easy to learn and work with, Pandora compatible in usage and easy on the eyes
No more double modifier keys so all those should be free for personal use.
In a sense, it does not hurt to have unnecessary symbols on the keymat: if you don't use them, you just don't use them. So it's mostly just a matter of æsthetics. But if you put important symbols like = on vowels, then you make it harder for people to map other things (like à or å or æ) on those vowels, because they have to start a recursive remapping nightmare.
I'll try to explain a little why I made the choices that I did. I know some of the less important symbols are on there but this basis-set includes just about every symbol to compose west european letters with.
As you might know dutch consists of many languages and we learn to read and write dutch, english, german and french in school by default. I guess that's why the dutch keyboard lay-out is so internationally oriented and diacritic heavy.
Almost every symbol that's on my standard dutch keyboard is in this lay-out. The only symbols I'm missing are ¦ ¬ « » ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¾. I could try to cram them in there somehow but didn't see the need for that, I never ever use those and it would just clutter it up.
And yes, ofcourse [Meta+C] for a ç is a little bit faster than [Meta+O]-[C] like in my proposal but atleast all possibilities are there at a glance and findable without mapping custom keys. Same goes for ëäöïüéáóíõãàèìòùç etc. That are a lot of characters I don't have to put on the keymat because the dead diacritics are on there, labeled and well.
The ß is a bit different in that regards but I think it's still a pretty important character. Iirc in modern german SS is used rather than ß but it's still a very comon so I just had to put it on there somehow. ED can maybe shed some light on that If the german majority says it doesn't have to be on the keymat I guess I can come up with something else to put there in it's place
As mentioned earlier I also removed all double modifier keys (Shift+Meta) so that entire layer would be empty to put composed characters on. If people want a ç underneath the C key, I guess it can be mapped to [shit+Meta+C]. Right?
As far as the Valuta is concerned, why not put it on there?
Not everyone will use them all but I use the £ $ and € quite often myself, I guess the Japanese/Asian pandora users will use the ¥ like I use the € and the £?
I think this lay-out is english, german, dutch, belgian and french user friendly and does not exclude italian and spanish either.