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    Colemak UK - Windows Native Colemak for the UK

    • Started by NottNott
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    Hey all. After trying out the default Colemak install at https://colemak.com/Windows I realised that many keys were bound by default to the US equivalents, such as the pound sign, hashtag, tilde, pipe etc. I whipped up a UK derivative in MKLC based on this that changes these characters back to the UK versions. Because it's a Windows-based solution, many programs can notice that you're using an alternate layout and change your default keybindings off the bat or even change keybindings that you wouldn't be able to customise at all otherwise. This is in contrast to a programmable keyboard or AutoHotKey (I haven't tried it, but I doubt programs check for it) which isn't built into Windows.

    This doesn't remap Caps Lock to backspace.Try the registry remappings at https://colemak.com/Registry_remapping (or use a programmable keyboard, they're great!).

    EDIT: Per this thread, I've made a version of Colemak UK that does remap Caps Lock to Backspace without any fancy registry hacks. A must-have in my opinion, but both options remain here for choice!

    'cmkuk' - the version that does not remap Caps Lock
    'cmkukb' - the version that does

    Last edited by NottNott (17-Apr-2018 13:57:50)
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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    Hope you got the VK codes right... ;-)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    There have been one or two previous KLC implementations of UK Colemak posted. I thought I had also made one, but looking in my github repo, it seems I only created a Wide Colemak one for some reason.

    It seems that US Colemak is most "official", but I'm also too used to having pound sign on the 3 and don't want to give that up :P

    Last edited by stevep99 (19-Feb-2018 16:21:38)

    Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    In my Colemak[eD] (for PKL/Win, and partially on XKB/Linux) I have pretty much everything: Dollar sign on Shift+4 (also useful for coding etc!), pound sign on Shift+AltGr+4, and a whole dead key full of currency symbols on AltGr+4 (including arcane stuff, like ؋₳₢₨৳₮₩ƒ₣₰₧..., and more common stuff like €¥円₪¢¤...).

    Last edited by DreymaR (17-Apr-2018 14:35:53)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
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    I've uploaded a version of this that remaps Caps Lock to Backspace - see the original post above.

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    For info, on Linux, xkeyboard-config also ships a UK Colemak variant keeping the UK symbols in place.

    Last edited by ghen (17-Apr-2018 14:04:23)
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    ghen said:

    For info, on Linux, xkeyboard-config also ships a UK Colemak variant keeping the UK symbols in place.

    Everything related to keyboards on Linux just seems to work out of the box! At least on the beginner friendly distros with a lovely installer. :)

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    Just realised I posted two threads in the wrong forum section, this should be in User contributions!

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    NottNott said:

    Everything related to keyboards on Linux just seems to work out of the box! At least on the beginner friendly distros with a lovely installer. :)

    I don't know, I've found arch which certainly isn't beginner friendly to work even better out of the box, and it's much easier to keep up with it, I'm still on my almost 10 year old install of arch, it's been rolling it's way up to now, so I guess there isn't much left of the one that I installed so many years ago, It's pretty nice.

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    sotolf said:

    I don't know, I've found arch which certainly isn't beginner friendly to work even better out of the box, and it's much easier to keep up with it, I'm still on my almost 10 year old install of arch, it's been rolling it's way up to now, so I guess there isn't much left of the one that I installed so many years ago, It's pretty nice.

    Yeah, I wasn't using Arch at the time I switched to Colemak - so I wouldn't have known. I loved Arch when I used it.

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    NottNott said:

    Yeah, I wasn't using Arch at the time I switched to Colemak - so I wouldn't have known. I loved Arch when I used it.

    Arch is great for a personal system, it's really a great one if you have the time to do a bit of maintenance some times, I like to keep my system rather lean though, so no big parts like GNOME, KDE, XFCE and such, and maintaining just a windowmanager like i3 and some programs is way less likely to break.

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    sotolf said:

    Arch is great for a personal system, it's really a great one if you have the time to do a bit of maintenance some times, I like to keep my system rather lean though, so no big parts like GNOME, KDE, XFCE and such, and maintaining just a windowmanager like i3 and some programs is way less likely to break.

    I had loads of fun, but my big problems actually came in when using just windowmanagers instead of a DE. Generally I just got frustrated with file type associations not working correctly, and I did spend countless hours trying to fix these sorts of issues. I think I did fix the issues in the end, but that doesn't stop your printer drivers from not working, or the steam overlay from crashing your entire game because of buggy Linux code from Valve... etc etc

    I really love Linux and gave it a solid go, but I guess the infrastructure around it is just too temperamental (third party printing drivers, graphics drivers come to mind). I will likely have to start using a public printer soon and I really don't want to be left in the dark if the printing drivers don't work. I'd really love it if these issues were addressed going forward so I could start using it again. Customising your OS to be just how you like it is loads of fun, and i3 was way more efficient than the normal desktop solution.

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    NottNott said:

    I had loads of fun, but my big problems actually came in when using just windowmanagers instead of a DE. Generally I just got frustrated with file type associations not working correctly, and I did spend countless hours trying to fix these sorts of issues. I think I did fix the issues in the end, but that doesn't stop your printer drivers from not working, or the steam overlay from crashing your entire game because of buggy Linux code from Valve... etc etc

    I really love Linux and gave it a solid go, but I guess the infrastructure around it is just too temperamental (third party printing drivers, graphics drivers come to mind). I will likely have to start using a public printer soon and I really don't want to be left in the dark if the printing drivers don't work. I'd really love it if these issues were addressed going forward so I could start using it again. Customising your OS to be just how you like it is loads of fun, and i3 was way more efficient than the normal desktop solution.

    Yeah, you are right about the drivers and stuff, never really had a problem with steam, but that might be luck on my side, it may also have something to do with steam actually only being coded against ubuntu/debian, and it's pretty cool that it works at all in arch :p

    I also run on very vanilla and fairly old hardware, so that never was a problem for me, and I never print stuff, so that is also something that was not a problem for me.I just wish there was a windowmanager like i3 for windows as well, that wasn't terribly hacky, as now that we have the subsystem for linux I would be pretty comfortable even running windows 10, we're using it at work, and to be honest it's actually been pretty good, and the easier work of playing games and stuff is tempting, I'm just missing my i3 a lot while I am at work, it's just the paradigm that I'm really the most comfortable with, and it just gets a lot of things that I don't care about away. And it doesn't hurt that it's extremely light weight as well.

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    sotolf said:

    Yeah, you are right about the drivers and stuff, never really had a problem with steam, but that might be luck on my side, it may also have something to do with steam actually only being coded against ubuntu/debian, and it's pretty cool that it works at all in arch :p

    I also run on very vanilla and fairly old hardware, so that never was a problem for me, and I never print stuff, so that is also something that was not a problem for me.I just wish there was a windowmanager like i3 for windows as well, that wasn't terribly hacky, as now that we have the subsystem for linux I would be pretty comfortable even running windows 10, we're using it at work, and to be honest it's actually been pretty good, and the easier work of playing games and stuff is tempting, I'm just missing my i3 a lot while I am at work, it's just the paradigm that I'm really the most comfortable with, and it just gets a lot of things that I don't care about away. And it doesn't hurt that it's extremely light weight as well.

    Can't agree more, I absolutely love the i3 way of doing things, it was way better. There's not even a rebindable shortcut to swap workspaces in Windows 10 in the meantime... what :(

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    Thanks for this NottNott, been creating my own .klc files for the Tarmak ETROI steps (thanks DreymaR!) but it's comforting to know this should work better! Literally just moved the last few keys, going to take some getting used to

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    Munnster56 said:

    Thanks for this NottNott, been creating my own .klc files for the Tarmak ETROI steps (thanks DreymaR!) but it's comforting to know this should work better! Literally just moved the last few keys, going to take some getting used to

    No problem! There's a solution for everybody!

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    How can I avoid control + alt + letter keys producing international keys like ç and œ instead of acting as keyboard shortcuts with this?

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    redsolaris said:

    How can I avoid control + alt + letter keys producing international keys like ç and œ instead of acting as keyboard shortcuts with this?

    Using MSKLC installed layouts, you'll need to use one that does not have an AltGr key. Such as these ones – most likely you need the ANSI keyboard one:
    https://github.com/DreymaR/BigBagKbdTri … hout-AltGr

    That file doesn't have the UK mappings though. However, are you sure that's what you want? I've never met an UK user who didn't use AltGr yet.

    Last edited by DreymaR (24-Mar-2022 12:59:25)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
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    DreymaR said:
    redsolaris said:

    How can I avoid control + alt + letter keys producing international keys like ç and œ instead of acting as keyboard shortcuts with this?

    Using MSKLC installed layouts, you'll need to use one that does not have an AltGr key. Such as these ones – most likely you need the ANSI keyboard one:
    https://github.com/DreymaR/BigBagKbdTri … hout-AltGr

    That file doesn't have the UK mappings though. However, are you sure that's what you want? I've never met an UK user who didn't use AltGr yet.

    Although AltGr is standard in the UK, it doesn't really give you any characters you need (by default). IIRC the standard Windows keymap only gives you accented vowels, which are only useful if you have the sudden urge to pretend your are French - which mainly only happens when you are re-enacting scenes from Holy Grail.

    There is also the Euro symbol on AltGr-4, which I guess is a bit more useful.

    It's why people should use AltGr either for Shift or a custom symbols layer instead!

    Last edited by stevep99 (24-Mar-2022 15:13:45)

    Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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    stevep99 said:

    It's why people should use AltGr either for Shift or a custom symbols layer instead!

    Indeed! In this case though, it appears our RedSolaris client isn't familiar with the concept and takes issue with it. Which struck me as odd for a Brit.

    Last edited by DreymaR (24-Mar-2022 15:35:20)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    Trying to get this approved at work; is there a github (or other opensource) repository of the Colemak UK source code we could build ourselves?

    Nvm:

    1. Install Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC)

    2. Apply the CapsLock hack

    3. Open MSLKC

    4. File->Load existing keyboard and select the Colemak NottNott created

    5. Project->Build Dll and Setup Package

    That covers all needed?

    Last edited by 9swampy (02-Apr-2022 18:28:09)
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