I wouldn't move @ to a better position, unless I typed about a hundred emails a day. One @ per email isn't that much. Besides, on my email, I can type in just the first letter or two and it looks at my contacts and figures out who I want to email. So I never really type @ unless it's a new email address, which I don't do often.

One thing that could be done on the American keyboard is to switch - = and [ ]. Colemak says that leaving [ ] in place is a benefit over Dvorak, which is kind of true because it makes it easier to remember, but it's not as good ergonomically speaking. It makes a pretty big difference.

The colon and semicolon should be switched, yes. In my letter frequency data (I use a good amount of semicolons, and had some C code) colon is about twice as common as colon. I was going to switch them, but then I didn't because I decided it would be too confusing. I have ! on an unshifted key, and a lot of time when I hit it, I accidentally hit shift. Moving between shifted and unshifted is very confusing, and I'm sure a swap like that would be even worse.

I don't think I have an AltGr key. :( I have the option key, which pulls up weird keys that I never use.

Switching accent and tilde would be good for the international market. A lot of languages that aren't English use accents, and (for me) accent requires the option modifier key.

Also I think swapping <> and () would be good. () is WAAAAAY more common, and is all the way on the top row.

SpeedMorph: The AltGr key (or on US keyboards, LCtrl+RAlt) is the Windows equivalent of the Mac Option key (and *nix Meta?). It isn't used on the plain US layout but on the US International and all other layouts I know of. No mystery there.

Sounds like I may want to try that colon-semicolon switch. It'll be really easy to change back for users who don't want it. I've tried to map a colon character to a NumPad decimal dot shift state, but that didn't work in the applications I tried: I think Windows' locale settings override that key or something, since they need to control decimal dot versus decimal comma settings.

I'm not so hot on the () vs. <> switch. I don't think the reach to those particular top row positions are so bad; about the same effort as the reach down to the bottom row <> positions actually. So if there's a benefit to the switch it'll be pretty marginal as I see it and therefore not worth sacrificing a lot of consistency for.

While getting - and = to more central locations may be sensible for a US user, most other layouts cannot afford it as they'll need those locations for national "weird keys that you never use" such as my æøåÆØÅ.  ;)

The () <> switch is more prominent on the Dvorak keyboard, which I was using when I thought of it.

Yeah, why the frick is Q on the home row?

Polish, polish, polish...

http://folk.uio.no/obech/Files/Keyboard … olemak.zip

That's how I did it. I guess you've tweaked a lot more but I'm not sure what's necessary.

I use two different layouts for English and Swedish. Initially I used SG_CAPS to change quickly between them but I decided against it. Changing between them is alt+shift+number as per usual. This is more convenient than AltGr switching since they together are about as common as "r" is in English.

My Swedish layout is exactly identical to the English one, except ;[' that are öåä.

I now use the VK_102 key for the 'ø'. If you need that letter, you'll likely have a keyboard with the extra key on it; it'll also be available on a dead key combination for those with US keyboards who rarely need to write it.

I read on Wikipedia that the letter 'ø' may come from Anglo-Saxon where it denoted a [ō]. I wish we'd change into writing 'āō' in all the Nordic/Germanic countries instead of all the silly 'æøäö' nonsense of today. Some Swedish and German people (such as cartoonists) use these 'lazy umlauts' already, and in handwriting the 'ø' is written by many as a sort of mean thing between 'ó' and 'ō' so to me that'd make a lot of sense. But I'm dreaming...  ;)

I started out with the semicolon and colon switched, but came to the conclusion that it simply isn't worth the confusion and effort. It's so nice to be in full compliance with the US Colemak (unless we're talking about AltGr mappings which are more 'work-in-progress' anyway). Also makes C coding nice, heh.

Having even a simple little change from the normal symbol setup makes for a lot of confusion and trouble. So many programs and web apps seems to assume that everyone worth mentioning have a US setup. Letter remapping works fine for the most part, but symbols give you a hard time. One reason for that is that many symbol keys send 'VK_#' virtual key codes, and messing with them causes trouble. Flash apps aren't always cool with remapped symbol keys either. There's also the matter of keyboard shortcuts and help sheets for them, and the fact that learning those symbol remappings seems extra confusing. Compared to all the trouble, the minute benefits one might wringe out of such remappings seem too small to me.

Some say that you should swap ;: ... some /? ... some =+ ... some -[ =] ... I now think that absolutely none of those are worth it! It causes so much more trouble than it could possibly alleviate, and I refuse to believe that it could noticeably affect my typing speed or comfort. As I've started using the symbols more (coding and suchlike) this becomes doubly true, which illustrates my point somewhat: The symbols that are relatively easily reachable will be used for several purposes as hotkeys and coding symbols, which makes them useful to have where they're expected to be.

And I fully agree with SpeedMorph up there: Switching a key symbol with its shifted 'sibling' is confusing and should not be attempted.

Personally, I've wondered why @ and " are the way they are on british keyboards too (and swapped them, despite being British). Couldn't really care about the £ pound symbol as long as it's somewhere, and # is easier to use where it is on a British keyboard (which is wierd considering it's got no literary use in English − wierd from a historical perspective).

True; too many people seem to have forgotten what semi-colons are for; they can actually be quite useful. Not that there's much point pondering that now.

I agree: firstly because of horrible experiences using Swiss/German keyboards (most symbols are remapped), secondly because I find having symbols on a third-level map (AltGr+XXX) much more effective than I imagine swapping a few of those keys around could be.