Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak - General

jaydee
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10-Nov-2012 17:11:08#1 Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

I am French and I am also an emacs user who prefers to have symmetrical alt keys for ergonomic reasons. As a result I am used to switching from AZERTY - which has an altgr key - to US QWERTY when using emacs.

I can see that Colemak is a great improvement over QWERTY and DVORAK, and having multilingual support is great. You can even type French characters with Colemak that you cannot access with AZERTY, i.e. æ, Æ, œ, Œ, É, Ç. But I would prefer to be able to switch between a -missing?- US Colemak layout and the regular Colemak layout.

Having to type Meta+key combinations is indeed much more comfortable when the two corresponding keys are located on opposite sides of the keyboard. I think that is why Colemak soundly places most international symbols on the left-hand side.

I am wondering what are the best solutions some users could have found in order to temporarily change Altgr to Ralt in Windows.

I hesitate to learn Colemak (other optimized-layout alternatives could be dvorak, workman, or the French Bépo layout). Having this Altgr issue is a no-go for me in case there was no workaround - and switching to gvim or viper mode is not an option.

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DreymaR
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10-Nov-2012 19:53:11#2 Re: Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

You're using Windows you say. Would that be Windows with PKL (my preferred way these days) or using the MS(KLC) layout installer?

Either way, there is an answer for you. What I'd do would be to make two layouts and switch between them with a hotkey. It's much easier to implement with PKL where you just copy (and rename) the layout folder then change the AltGr to a RAlt in the layout.ini file; and you can furthermore then choose the switching hotkey combo freely (I use Ctrl+Shift+2 for instance). Making a functional Windows installer that messes with modifiers requires manual C code compiling.

Last edited by DreymaR (10-Nov-2012 19:55:37)

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jaydee
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11-Nov-2012 13:22:20#3 Re: Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

I was not aware of PKL and MSKLC - I had actually installed Colemak's KLC installer but did not realize it was a MS tool.

Anyway, I had a look at both tools and I could quickly manage to get my RAlt with both of them.

Thanks a lot.

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DreymaR
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11-Nov-2012 21:00:05#4 Re: Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

Glad I could help! Obviously, you're easily helped if that was enough. ;Þ

Tell us, how did you do the RAlt mapping with the MSKLC? Did you have to compile your own?

Last edited by DreymaR (11-Nov-2012 21:01:21)

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jaydee
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11-Nov-2012 23:10:55#5 Re: Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

Just knowing which programs to use was a great help. And yes, I compiled my own layout with MSKLC:

- I did the RAlt mapping by defining the Colemak layout from scratch in MSKLC without anything bound to AltGr. Maybe I could have started with "Load Existing keyboard" as well.
- I kept Backspace unchanged since it looks like you cannot remap it.
- I selected Project>"Build DLL and Setup Package"
- Then I ran setup.exe since I do have administrator privileges on my home computer.

One piece of advice for anybody who would want to do the same: You should keep the "properties" field in Project>Properties quite short. This will be the name of your keyboard. In case it was too long - I do not know exactly the maximum number of characters- then the name of your new keyboard would not be displayed when looking at language bar> Options> Parameters at the location of the newly created keyboard for the selected language (anyway this is what happened for me). This was not a big deal though, since I could see the comment was properly displayed in the language bar. The problem is MSKLC is bugged, and would not take into account any update on "properties" after re-compilation and re-installation. I created the layout a second time with a shorter properties name, what solved this minor issue.

Regarding PKL:
- I created a second colemak directory - i.e. emacs_colemak - where I commented the shiftstates line under the global section of layout.ini
- I defined the name of the new directory as "layout" parameter in pkl.ini:
- layout = emacs_colemak:emacs_colemak, colemak:colemak
- I added a switching hotkey:
- changeLayoutHotKey = LCtrl & RCtrl

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jaydee
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11-Nov-2012 23:21:40#6 Re: Getting a right Alt key instead of AltGr in Windows with Colemak

erratum: The keyboard field that should stay short is actually Project>Properties>Description in MSKLC. The name field is limited to 8 characters only and you cannot fill in anything longer in there.

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