Done; I also took the opportunity to change the parentheses around:

(Not sure how useful that'll be either, since the middle keys are fairly hard to reach.  We'll have to see in practice.)

Edit: one of the weird things it that, when I switch to qwerty, the return is still set as '/".  Effectively, there's no more Return in qwerty.

Edit 2: I've switched the return key back.  I'm going to regret this once I have to type something with lots of quotes.  My main concerns were compatibility (as at least the wide layout is normal colemak just shifted a little, whereas changing return around causes troubles even in linux) and that my pinkie started to hurt when trying programs (e.g. some games) were you have to type enter a lot.

Good point; I was messing up the number presses earlier.

I was xkbing the return, but it seems to apply the return-key symbols of the topmost layout to all the others (which, since that overrides the sole return for most layouts, effectively removes their returns).

I do think that your Wide pc104 layout looks very nice now! I should incorporate it into my Big Bag files, with and without the pc104 Angle mod. Pressing Z with the ring finger and so on solves the wrist angle problem but it does mean relearning the fingering for at least 5 keys which some will want to avoid.

You should be able to change the modifiers in the "usr\share\X11\xkb\symbols\us" by adding this:

key <CAPS> {  [   Control_L,      Control_L,         Control_L,          Control_L  ] }; 
key <LCTL> {  [   Multi_key,      Multi_key,         Multi_key,          Multi_key  ] };

That is, assuming I'm reading the image correctly and you want a compose key in place of Left Control.
You would also need to comment out the old <CAPS> function.

vaskozl: That weird symbol at ctrl is [apparently] ESC; sorry I forgot to mention that earlier.  So my mapping goes Caps -> Esc -> Ctrl -> Caps

dreymar: I'm pretty sure I'm modifying the colemak one.  It begins with

// Colemak symbols for xkb on X.Org Server 7.x
// 2006-01-01 Shai Coleman, https://colemak.com/ . Public domain.

partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "colemak" {
    include "us"
    name[Group1]= "USA - Colemak";

I think the deal is just that ubuntu does some weird stuff with the topmost layout, like setting the shortcuts based on it, and apparently setting the [physical] Return key as well.

I was able to override this setting by adding a Return to the other layout (in this case us(default)).  So the problem can be avoided as long as all your used layouts set Return.

Also, a question about PKL configs.  When trying AHK, I noticed it would occasionally miss keys, especially when I was typing quickly.  Is this still an issue with compiled AHK scripts?

@lalop, that's a bug in Ubuntu.  If you search the forum you'll see a simililar bug in Debian, which has no doubt percolated through.  Make sure you report it.

Update: I wonder if I'm thinking of the same issue.  What I'm flagging is the order in which your layouts are in Gnome, and the shortcut issue that was outlined - that when using ctrl shortcuts, it's working from a different layout.  I remember being fresh to Dvorak, and thinking that having Qwerty shortcuts was the norm because of the same bug.  If it is this bug, then I guess it relates to Gnome?

This is it, and the same thing happens for the Return symbols: it uses the ones from the topmost layout.  The shortcuts seem to be a "feature" rather than a bug, sadly. 

Possible related bug (though it seems to affect all KDE apps, rather than just the default shortcuts)

dreymar: It's probably a program issue, but geeqie.  Although you are able to remap in the main window, it just fails (in just about every way) in any additional windows you may pop up.

As for AHK, I was getting qwerty leakage very often, but it could be because I was playing starcraft at the time.

Edit: in a separate issue you may have knowledge of, sublime text doesn't seem to recognize any of my "control" altgr keys.  That is, symbolic stuff like -=+_ works, but arrow, backspace, return don't.

So that's a KDE thing?  Rather ridiculous unintuitive behaviour that.  That should be an addon/tweak, rather than a default!  How perversely stupid.

The inspiration, yes... Well, colemak.vim was part of it for sure. Specifically, the JH LY UNEI (PgUp/PgDn Home/End Arrows) navigation block was very nice. So I made an AHK script that provided such a block everywhere (adding the ;O Back/Del editing keys) and quickly became very happy with it – especially when I found out how well it worked together with modifiers. The F keys on the number row were a natural addition, an accessible Esc key was a great boon as you've noted and so on.

Then PKL came with a full Extend layer that took it to completion and I just tweaked that to my liking. There have been several people involved in this and in my opinion it's just gotten better and better. ;)

Workman's chart is Workman's feelings about this. Trust your own feelings more; they're probably as good and more relevant to you. As long as you're open to the possible effects of techniques and training that seems like the best strategy to me.

For me for instance, the WF and UY keys would only be 1.5 effort and I have a bad feeling about some of the others... ;) And let's not forget that we use different fingering for the ZXCVB keys, alleviating the penalties for most of these!

Out of curiosity: How does the apostophe key feel up there? And the slash/question in the middle? Acceptable solutions, or annoying? They're probably the best answers to making a Wide mod we'll come up with but learning them can still be tricky.

What I would find really intriguing is a layout where the home rows are the curves awft nuyo, a sort of workman/Jason style taken to the extreme, if you will.  Assuming that those buttons really are more natural than my current method of sort of hovering between the two rows, I could see that being an awesome experiment, among other things.

Apostrophe is barely noticeable anymore (though I suspect it may still have a speed penalty).  The slash/question mark are quite nice to press, possibly even better than the original position!  Sadly, the same can not be said for !,\, but those are rare and I almost never hit those keys.  So all-in-all, acceptable.

The other update is that I've started using amphetype to "read" (though I'll probably skip chapters where it gets too tedious, this at least ensures that my practice accomplishes something).  Unfortunately, I immediately came upon the python altgr bug: none of the "command"-like altgrs (backspace, enter, and the like) work.  I managed to hack in the altgr backspace (as without that I would probably have given up), by adding the following line to Quizzer.py's keyPressEvent function:

elif e.key() == Qt.Key_Backspace and int(e.modifiers()) == 1073741824: #Altgr backspace
            e = QKeyEvent(QEvent.KeyPress, e.key(), Qt.KeyboardModifiers(0),e.text(),e.isAutoRepeat(),e.count())

Essentially, the altgr backspace is already triggered (Qt.Key_Backspace with modifier 1073741824); it's just that qt decided not to do anything with that modifier for some reason.  So I created a new QKeyEvent that strips it of the modifier, making it just like normal backspace.  You would probably have to do something similar with the other "command" keypresses.

The bad news, though, is that ctrl+[altgr backspace] doesn't work; it doesn't even seem to trigger a keyPressEvent at all.  So that's pretty rubbish.

First major update/experiment in some time: since Esc is so common with vimlike environments, trying out moving Esc to Tab.  This frees space for a better parens layout:

Advantages:

1. The parentheses positions are better and cleaner

2. Esc gets a one-finger key

Disadvantages:

1. Tabs, though not very common, are used in unexpected places, leading to weird behaviors

2. Tab might not actually be a better position for Esc than AltGr+t, which is rather more immediate.

I am having doubts that this was a worthy change.  The old parentheses' positions were not that bad.

Update: reverted.  The experiment can still be found in these branches:

https://github.com/lalopmak/keyboard-ma … e/EscAtTab
https://github.com/lalopmak/wide-layout … e/EscAtTab