Heisann Steinar! Hyggelig med flere nordmenn her.  ( のvの) c[_]

The middle row is actually quite easily reached once you get a little used to the Wide mod. And you can use either hand for it.

However, what I actually use for æøå these days is my thumb CoDeKey sequencing with those keys – although the AltGr mappings to the same keys still work. Sequencing is so nice in practical use. It isn't implemented on MacOS that I know of though, so maybe you want something else. An easily accessible dead key layer will do the same thing, pretty much. But then you could also just use EOA as your ÆØÅ release keys, or whatever pleases you most.

Maybe I write a lot less Norwegian than you will, but that feels good enough for me. Doing a fair bit of coding and suchlike means I'd rather have my brackets handy.

As for typing Norwegian, I don't feel like trying to optimize a layout for both. Colemak feels, as I said, good enough for it. The KJ bigram sucks, maybe you could have that too in a DK layer if you feel like it? I never bother, I just tank it. Other than that, the most common Norwegian letters (ERNTSILAKO) are similar enough to the most common English ones (ETAOINSHRDL).

For an Extend layer implementation, look in the BigBag for Mac (choose the Apple platform icon) to find ProfessorXWing's files; he's known as CSGO on the Colemak Discord.

If you're considering other layouts than Colemak, I wouldn't go with ISRT. If you feel like being brave and adventurous and maybe get disappointed, then I recommend studying Pascal Getreuer's alt layout guide. Link in the BigBag. Again, Colemak-CAWS feels very good to me, but I know others prefer one new layout or the other. Seems there's no clear winner in that game, though, and many use wayyy too much energy layout-hopping when they could've learnt other useful typing tools instead. Consider yourself warned, heh.

Newcomers to Colemak and other layouts tend to complain about the HJKL Vim mappings being all over the place. On Colemak, that's especially true for J I guess. I use Extend arrows with Vim and many others do too. No problem. Some still complain, but I have a feeling it's mostly newcomers. See the Community FAQ at colemak.org if you want more info.

If you have an ISO board and want CAW, I'd slap on a Sym mod for full CAWS. That's what I use, and I'm very happy with it! As you say, you can also put often-used symbols in layers, but symbols that are used in text like hyphen and apostrophe should IMO be on the base layer too. Some users of mech boards get very hung up on minimalism and want 30/34-key layouts, but I'm not one of those. The important thing is to keep often-used keys close to home position, but less-used keys can hang around on the base layer too! Plus, having more than 40 or so keys means you can map layers and whatnot to them without having to chord modifiers or use other convoluted and mind-intensive solutions.

Either way, lykke til og god ferd!  (b￣◇￣)b

Described under 'sequencing' in the BB, at the end of the section. Under Ergonomy > Modifiers is a description of the physical key arrangement I use.
https://dreymar.colemak.org/layers-main.html#sequences

But basically, you don't require that key to be a Compose/Deadkey combo key like I use – that's obviously just gravy. A normal dead key would do it just as well, minus the Compose thing (which you could have on another key anyway).

As you can see, I use the home row mappings (Colemak NEIO) for punctuation-space(-capitalization). Not sure whether that's even doable on MacOS. So yes, you could put your ÆØÅ there if you wish to.

Never mind, I think I'm getting it now. "Cmk" = Colemak and "QWE" is QWERTY keys. The table looks very interesting. If I can get Karabiner Elements to remap the right CMD (where right alt/altGR would be on Windows) key individually, I might try out your CoDeKey mappings.

I still didn't find any explanation on your website to a sequence for ÆØÅ - mind sharing exactly what you use?

And I'll try once more for the keyboard layout overviews under locales:
- lower left corner = base layer
- upper left corner = shift layer
- lower right corner = alt?
- upper right corner = altGR?

The four standard layers of key maps are base, Shift, AltGr and AltGr+Shift.

The sequence I use is, e.g., `CDK, [ ` for å or `CDK, }` for Æ, etc. It's at the bottom of the CoDeKey section in the BigBag.

That key is special as it can be both a leader key (dead key) and a post-hoc Compose. If it doesn't recognize a composable sequence, it acts as a dead key. It's a fun project I have. Sometimes I'll write something that turns out to be a Compose sequence even if I didn't intend it to be, so it takes a little tweaking to get right. But it's fun for me, mostly, and can feel very powerful at times. I still sometimes wonder whether I should separate the two functions again, but so far I'm happy with the CoDeKey.

No biggie, but it's where I said it was. At the bottom of the the CoDeKey subsection under "Sequences" there's a table listing my CoDeKey mappings, and the bottom of that table looks like this:

|  Q        |  Q        |  Escape                |
|  D        |  C        |  Delete Previous Word  |
|  [ ] /    |  [ ] /    |  locale/custom glyphs  |
+-----------+-----------+------------------------+

In our case, our locale glyphs are ÆØÅ.