• You are not logged in.

    Qwpr layout (Colemak-inspired)

    • Started by chema_quinn
    • 1 Replies:
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 14-Mar-2013
    • Posts: 10

    I've made a new layout called qwpr. It's slightly less ergonomically ideal than Colemak, but significantly even easier to learn (only 11 keys move from QWERTY, 9 of them on the same finger). It also has an accessible altgr¹ which gets you punctuation, arrow keys, and dead keys, thus making it significantly superior for programming and competitive with Colemak for languages with accents. You can see a feature comparison table and some Keyboard Layout Analyzer results including English, English with 5% backspace, coffeescript, and Spanish. The layout also has over 1000 (!) possible character outputs, including a lot of useful unicode symbols.

    Since one of its primary advantages is an easy learning curve coming from QWERTY, I wouldn't expect anyone who's already made the leap to Colemak (or Dvorak) to switch. Once you've left QWERTY behind, any small advantages from switching are not worth the effort. Still, I thought people here might like to know.

    It's currently available as an OSX .keylayout file and as a pkl layout.ini with images. I made a python script that converts .keylayout to layout.ini. The output is never perfect because of windows bugs, and so getting pkl to work (including workarounds for the alt-tab issue and some arrow key bugs) took some fiddling. Y'all are welcome to look at how I did it; just go to the sourceforge home page (first link) and click over to "files".

    ¹AltGr is on capslock; delete is on tab, and tab is on backquote and also in the altgr plane

    So here it is (without the many dead key planes):
    qwpr basic layout

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 14-Mar-2013
    • Posts: 10

    I forgot to ask: can anyone help me write a script to convert this to xwindows format? If possible, I'd need to figure out how to make new dead keys, and dead keys which distinguish which key you hit to get the same symbol. If you know about that, I can write the script; and hopefully it would be useful for more than just me and more layouts than just mine.

    Offline
    • 0