Ah yes, I remember seeing your AltGr symbol layer. I would have to do a major hotkey remapping for that layer (to the Win key which I already heavily use) as controlling my *nix tiling window manager environments with the Alt key is pretty much ingrained from a decade of usage and, unfortunately, the Poker 2 does not distinguish between the left and right Alt keys.
The beauty of programming a keyboard like the Poker 2 to implement these Colemak variations is that I can simply plug it into any computer and I am good to go -- in fact, I am finding that I have to do that now, as I have become so accustomed to the Curl mod in this short time! As symbols and special characters aren't used significantly by me, I can continue to make do with the "shift + number" row for now.
The relocated Shift to the Qwerty Z position really does feel noticeably better -- not surprisingly, since it restores the ANSI Shift (relative) position with the Curl mod. Both pinkies are happy now! The symbol groupings are relatively intact and still look reasonably balanced (depending on your personal aesthetic, I'm biased!), save for the inner Shift, and the *equal* sign is still accessible.
I think I have a layout that I can stick with for more than a day now! :-)
...
This is the layout I finally settled on with changes to the left hand symbol cluster -- my *nix/Vim usage shows..
` = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ]
Tab - Q W F P B J L U Y ; ' Del
Esc / A R S T G M N E I O Enter
\ Shift X C D V Z K H , . Shift
Ctrl Win Alt Space Backspace Fn Pn Ctrl
I originally thought that I'd want a larger *left shift* key but it actually is better as is, allowing easy reach of the *backslash* -- use it to conveniently "escape" characters (plus, it doesn't look out of place, being almost in the mirror position it was on the right hand side!). I can't say enough about how effective it is to be able to curl the pinkies to press the *shift* keys.
Last edited by sdothum (06-Apr-2015 00:25:50)