This is what I came up with in my locale thread: Ññ on the VK_102 key and an acute dead key on the left bracket (which on my ergo mod is in the middle). Should work fine for Spanish where there's only one letter with a tilde? Maybe not if you're using the brackets extremely often for coding; then a single accent dead key on VK_102 is probably a better solution.

Changing the dead key tables can be a bit daunting when you're doing it on several platforms, but it isn't that hard. On Windows MSKLC it's a bit clunky but easy enough to do. For PKL it's a bit ugly but also doable.

I heartily recommend shifting ZXCVB to the left on your keyboard! Once you're used to it you'll wonder why you didn't do it before.

By the way: Keep in mind that in international usage the acute accent is *not* a 'tilde'; that's special for Spanish. So please refer to the acute as 'acute' or at least 'accent' and not a 'tilde' if you wish to avoid confusion. :)

Thank you so much!

@ghen Yes, that is exactly what I need. I will test it asap.

@DreymaR I will follow your advice and shift it, I'll let you know.

Thanks!!!

Kind regards!

DreymaR is right, my spanish did betray me on that sentence. Sorry for the confusion.

I have tested ghen's proposal and it works perfectly on the terminal and in other applications (libreoffice), but not in firefox. In firefox still ń. Maybe I'll have to restart X again? Maybe switching layouts confused the firefox, have to test further.

I was also wondering whether this could be something easily implementable on a keyboard layout for "standard" layout switch or if they would require further modifications (as with a patch like DreymaR's installation script) to several files, and that would hurt adoption.

Also I have shifted keys to the left and for the time now (just a couple of hours and 15min of ktouch) and I am suffering a lot :-S
I still don't know if this could get to a standardarised spanish layout, it may be too weird for average people to switch to.

I am reconsidering to leave the <LSGT> key where it originally was and let the á suffer (would have to do that either with pinky repetition or with finger shift (pinky dead_acute + ring finger a), the latter I do not know how good or bad can be for speed - ). And words with "ár" will extend the suffering... luckily there aren't so many there (árbol, árabe...  around ~23 words). Any usability expert here? How bad does this look?
I'll try both options for a while and let you know my findings. I will try to propose that to non-geek humans, and see what they think of either option.
For the catalanian friends, maybe a good compromise would be just to make the grave key a dead key, so they could have that (not as convenient as the other one, though). That or that shift+acute=dead_grave. Any catalanian here to express his/her opinion on this?

So in the search of a minimal colemak_es (no wide layout, no local symbols) just those changes would do to make it easy for spanish speaking people to change, or at least that is what I imagine.

Initially I thought of keeping the symbols, but as they don't make any sense either, it is best you don't look at the keyboard at all, even for those.
So if DreymaR finally submits his variants to X.Org, there would be all his locale variants for people wanting to keep local symbols, the wide layouts and this minimal change spanish colemak version (this is becoming something like a dream now, being able to install this layout first thing after or even during debian/ubuntu installation...).

By the way, any progress on submitting your variants, @DreymaR? How difficult is that? Have you considered submitting to Apple, too?

Thanks a lot for all your help, kind regards.

Ugh, the XIM vs GTK mess is why Linux dead keys have been a disappointment for me so far. I don't enjoy the idea of dead keys that works in some situations and require special app settings in others. It's not just Firefox, is it?

The idea of ñ on the acute key cannot be generalized, as other languages need the ń and/or a proper tilde key. I don't feel like using it myself as it's illogical and inflexible. So it'll have to be a special trick for Spanish users who are specially interested. It'll be a bit tricky to implement as you can see, and certainly involves changing several files. That said, it'd be possible to write a script that makes all the changes so that you may run it easily.

If I recall correctly, GTK and QT apps can be told to use the XIM by adding the following to your ~/.xsessionrc or ~/.xinitrc file (QT apps should use XIM already but just in case):

export DISABLE_IMSETTINGS=yes
export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export QT_IM_MODULE=xim

I'm not sure what DISABLE_IMSETTINGS does, but I've seen it in use elsewhere.