That is certainly personal preference but I never use it, and you used it once where I would have used a comma. Anyway ...

A great modification would be to remap the special keys to the middle of the keyboard (using shift) instead of having them over the numbers all the way up the keyboard. The creator of the DDvorak had that idea and that's really clever for programming.

Ah, yes, obviously a French Colemak layout has to be created. I'll get to it if nobody beat me to the pip. There is however, a question of preference and usage. I'm thinking that the accent grave accent belongs with the AltGr+A, E etc., so to keep the aigu (acute) off dead keys we need to make choices, and they should be good ones. I need feedback from bona fide French speakers.

My first impression judging from a glance at the AZERTY is that the most important accented/special characters are àçéèù - is that right? If there aren't more common ones than this we won't have much of a problem I guess. Putting àçèù directly on AltGr plus the respective keys is and é to the right of the O for instance, is one suggestion; but as I said it really depends on how much each one of these characters are used in French.

The punctuation keys to the right of Y (two keys) and O (one key) are used for special national characters that are fairly common in use (around 0.5-1.0% by my estimate). Would that be a possibility, even if it would bring the brackets to AltGr+number keys like they are on those national layouts (like German and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian for example)? Does the French physical keyboard have the 105th key in the lower left corner which many national layouts use (usually for the less-than and greater-than signs)? A little extra room is useful.

I could implement a French layout for Windows, but not the Unix/Linux variants with any kind of ease. I'm hoping someone else could do that.

DreymaR--good to have you on the job. Let's see if I can answer your questions:

(1) the most common accented characters by far are (in the order of frequency): é, è and à. Even on AZERTY, the circonflexe (^) and the tréma (umlaut) are on dead keys, so I guess we could retain that, though it'd be good not to have to use AltGr to do these (AZERTY has a dedicated key, which does tréma with Shift and circonflexe without, which I think is a brilliant solution). I personally would be happy with retaining ç as AltGr-c and to type ù as on standard Colemak, with a dead key, even the horrible AltGr-R; ù used in only one word (où).

(2) Another particularity of AZERTY is that you can't do uppercase accented characters on it, which I guess is a "feature" we could retain - which would annoy Quebeckers who do use them. Any input on that from other French speakers? I personally don't care either way but that way we could have say é and è on one key with Shift to switch between the two...

(3) Yes, French keyboards do have the extra key, two of them actually (both the left Shift and the Enter key are smaller than on US keyboards).

Shai--what app did you use to create the Mac layout? I'd be happy to copy DreymaR's solution onto Mac. Also, how about we get a wiki page for the national layouts? Surely it'd be better than scouring the forum (especially in obscure topics like this one!).

Thanks Korivak, this looks pretty good (and BTW could be used to get a better icon for Colemak on Mac, the default "keyboard" one is not very glamourous and I've always appreciated this little blob of colour on my menu bar before!).

DreymaR - any conclusions on the ideal implementation of The French Colemak (I suggest we call it code name Rhinôçérôse and maybe have a separate thread for it...)?