My solution to this is to define an alternative AltGr layer with all the most common programming characters, such as brackets, dash, underscore, etc, right under the home keys.

https://github.com/stevep99/keyboard-tw … ster/AltGr

It's much better that trying to re-arrange them between varying degrees of poor positions on the extreme right of the keyboard.

Thanks for the solution. .  sadly, the right alt is really hard to press even with wide mode because of my short thumb.  It is better pressed with ring finger but I will missed out all the key to press with that.

I am using a kinesis edge and has a second layer accessed using the left thumb
Currently, my fn layer is like this:
the left side is all ctrl+ base key; I have switched the bottom row to top row so the copy and paste is done with F and P.
the right side is mainly used for arrow and bracket. the H for { and ; for } plus the bottom row used for =" and ='
this is why I moved the -_ to the home row as in Dvorak.
However, I feel that it is not optimized, because I just put them randomly around the arrow keys. 

Other than that, I do want to have a num pad somewhere on the right side.  I can change one of the hotkey to extend though so will try that out

I'm considering a symbol key mod. As SteveP says, you can of course put symbols in layers. At the same time, using the Wide mod moves a few symbol keys anyway. And the apostrophe/quote and hyphen-minus/underscore are too poorly placed so why not improve it layers aside?

I don't feel particularly moved by Dvorak's placements though. At the moment I'm considering swapping quote and semicolon to make all those t's bigrams nicer, and moving the minus down to the slash/question position where it'd be more accessible – particularly using the Wide mod. For the latter, I think maybe the equals/plus key could join in, like this:

6   7   8   9   0   =   /
j   l   u   y   '   [   ]   \
h   n   e   i   o   ;
k   m   ,   .   -   _____

QU > SC
MN > SL > EQ for ANSI; for ISO I'd also swap / and \ (MN > SL > BS > EQ)

With the Wide-ISO mod, on a staggered board:

  \   7   8   9   0   =
[   j   l   u   y   '   -
 ]   h   n   e   i   o   ;
   /   k   m   ,   .   _____

Thing is, "worth the effort" is super subjective. We have several people at the Discord trying out multiple layouts at once just because they can! Oh my. I'm thinking that this symbol rotation would be one of the optional building blocks for the connoiseurs. Some complain that Colemak leaves all the symbol keys in place while Dvorak moved them and fixed some problems,

For English at least, either one of the single or double quote symbols make the key position worth improving relative to the four rarest letters on their own. So I don't think it'll be bad for locale users, as long as they write some English. The main point is that the apostrophe and to some extent the hyphen are text-oriented symbols that frequently pop up in normal text. Thus, moving them closer to the home position should feel good for the text typing flow. Layers is an acceptable solution but my hypothesis is that a close-to-home apostrophe should be that little bit better. My AltGr layer is busy doing other things anyway and I haven't dared try too much modifier magic outside Extend yet.  (=^･ω･^=)丿

Of the three symbols

- ' ; 

perhaps the dash/minus is be the most frequent? If so this looks reasonable to me.

If you are switching around the symbols, would you not prioritize apostrophe higher than semicolon though?

i.e.

6 7 8 9 0 [ ]
j l u y ' ;  = \
h n e i o -
k m , . /

But I'm not really a fan of any of these keys to the right of the main section, so I'd still prefer a symbols layer to re-arranging keys.

Hmm, I'd totally forgotten about emojis. The frequencies of the various symbols used in modern typing - messaging and suchlike - must be somewhat different from traditional/formal typing. Yet more complications.

All those cases may well be subjective. Do the emoji and coding usages really affect typing flow, or are the keys mainly used as symbol keys for those purposes? The main argument for putting the apostrophe and hyphen closer to the text block is their frequent usage in text.

These are the relative frequencies of some letters and symbols in English text syllabi including code, according to the McDickens page:

Excluding code: b , . v k ' " - x 0 j 1 q 2 z ) ( : ! ? 5 ;
Including code: b , . v k - " _ ' x ) ( ; 0 j 1 q = 2 : z /

Note that even including code the semicolon isn't more frequent than the parentheses or apostrophe. You're right that the hyphen beats the apostrophe for coders, but the two quotes together hold their own against hyphen+underscore. Looks like nearly a toss-up all in all, but the quotes clearly win for pure text. At any rate, we clearly see why these keys deserve to be near the letter block as they are more common than the rarest letters X J Q Z.

I remember from my Dvorak days that I really enjoyed the placements of the period and comma. Well, of course I did, they're very good spots. Only later did I realize that their placements were unnecessarily good and there were letters more deserving of them. So what you have to ask yourself is what affects your typing flow the most. Symbols are generally a bit out-of-flow anyway, unless you're a typing prodigy like Sean Wrona.  (=ʘᆽʘ=)ʃ

But as you can see above, I still do put the semicolon in a close position since it can be situationally needed. For coding though, I'd consider a tap dance like {Extend,o} producing semicolon plus enter. Still two strokes but without a stretch, and if you use it a lot you'll get used to it. Tap-Extend is ideal for boilerplate-producing shortcuts in general. I use it for kaomoji!  Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ