Buongiorno! :)

Okay, so since è is easy to hit in both the 'keep local' and 'unified' locale Colemak variants I'm assuming you mean the capitalized variant È?

My impression is that it isn't all that frequent therefore it doesn't get a special place on the normal Italian keyboard even (as it has a key with èé and no capitalized versions of them). In my Colemak[edition DreymaR] layout variants I have the grave accent as a dead key on the backslash key with AltGr which isn't so bad to hit but nowhere near as easy as the acute accent on the tick key.

Either that, or it's a good Windows implementation you're after. Well, it so happens that I made one a little back! It's name is 'colemak-eD-It_ISO' and to use it you'll have to download my PKL and put it in a C:\PortableApps folder (or whichever folder is more convenient for you really), then edit the pkl.ini file to use that layout on the active 'layout = ' line.

Not sure what you mean by "changing 90% of the keys"?

Well, I sometimes use a flat screwdriver head to gently pry off the caps – especially on laptop boards.

Porgy, you should realize that that image is showing several things: The Italian locale layout, my Colemak[eD] AltGr mappings on the gray keys, and the AngleWide ergonomic mod which puts the []œ\ keys in the middle. You don't have to do all that! I couldn't make images without those things at the time I made that huge bunch of locale pics (using the default Linux layout display tool), unfortunately, which can be a bit confusing I guess.

The 'keep local symbols' layout simply changes the keys around to Colemak letter positions, without changing the AltGr mappings for the symbol keys. So the èé key is simply kept intact, and whatever way you usually produce the È should still work? It's not on the standard Italian layout as far as I can see so I don't know how you do it.

Are you on Windows? If so, as mentioned there is actually an Italian PKL Colemak[eD] layout in my download. With that you get the 'unified' layout which has much cooler AltGr mappings for all the keys, but the èé key is the same so no problem. That layout is not WideAngle modded.

Oh, so the silly designers actually didn't put the È anywhere. I was wondering about that. Fear not though, we can get you one just fine.

A dead key is a key that doesn't produce direct output before it's released by another key press. So if you press the grave accent dead key (which on my layout is on AltGr+\) and then an E you'll get an È. That's actually four key presses, but at least it's a lot more intuitive than remembering the number 0200! To produce more common accents the ¨ and ´ dead keys are easily accessible on the ' and ; keys (still with AltGr but they're easy combos!). If you want to use dead keys more, you could use the Spanish "unified" layout which has dead keys for ´ and ` in simple positions so that È will be only three key presses. But some people don't like dead keys.

My download can be found by following the link in my signature (the PKL one)! It's at the end of the main topic post. Try it out maybe? As said, you'll have to edit the 'layout = ' line in the pkl.ini file to point to the name of the layout folder you want, and/or comment out any other active layout lines with a starting semicolon. In your case what you'll want is something like:

layout = colemak-eD-It_ISO:Colemak[eD]-Italian

Sure, that'll work. In my experience if a key has a frequency of about 0.5% or more it's nice to have a solution for it – and if it's around 1.0 % I feel it becomes disruptive if that key is hard to use. The last time I looked, the è in Italian was 0.4% but the grave keys together are 0.9% so a grave dead key is a good solution then!

It's quite easy to use the International US layout with a "VirtualKey" PKL Colemak so you get the dead keys and stuff. The disadvantage of that layout is that it doesn't have the caret and tilde and other accent characters as normal mappings! So to get a tilde you'll have to type the dead key and then release it; sometimes that's tricky depending on the app you're in. This annoys people who have to write code, so my solution was to provide both: The tilde is on Shift-`and the tilde dead key on AltGr-`(while the `dead key had to move to \ which is intuitive by analogy and well enough placed I think).

I think you may have misunderstood the nature of keyboards? Just a feeling.

The International US layout isn't a physical keyboard per se but a software layout that adds AltGr mappings to the otherwise bare US layout. I don't know of physical boards manufactured with these symbols on them, but they aren't really necessary to type unless you need the symbols on the key caps as a reminder.

A keyboard sends scan codes for the keys to the computer, and the computer decides what to do with them. So when I type Colemak the scan code for a given key is interpreted as a certain "Virtual Key" that may be different from the one a QWERTY layout would give, and then a "key event" corresponding to that VK is sent to the Input Stream. That's how the same scan code produces a K in Colemak and an N in QWERTY.

There are keyboards that change their scan codes so you can type Colemak or Dvorak or whatever without installing or configuring anything on the computer. If I wanted to type Colemak on my PlayStation either that or a USB plug-between device would be my only hope. But on computers I find it easy enough to run PKL (Windows) or my patches (Linux).

Hi!
I've applied the stickers I bought from 4keyboard.com to my laptop keyboard. Now I'm discovering all useful keys, in particular the capital è is obtained by pressing: AltGr + '\' release, then Shift key + 'e' (Colemak 'e', of course). You can get the back-slash key ( \ ) with your right-hand pinky finger, just 2 keys at the right of letter 'o'.

If you type/uncomment the command Dreymar suggested, in the pkl.ini script for Windows (see above, post #7), then the other accented keys, often used in Italian, are located in the right top row, around the Return Key. These are letters 'è', 'à', 'é' (to get this last one, press Shift + 'è', with your right pinky). The 'ò' is on the bottom left corner, corresponding to former QWERTY '< >' (lesser/greater) key. One last letter, 'ì', is obtained by pressing AltGr + 'j'.

Equivalently, press AltGr + ' or \ + vowel that you want accented.

This is what I've figured out so far, in Windows. Things might be different for Linux-Debian but for that I'm waiting Dreymar's next update. I'll mark this thread as SOLVED.