I don't see how that can be so useful, myself. If anything, I'd personally prefer using middle and ring fingers for opening and closing anything, instead of two pairs of fingers which feels confusing. That's how I do it in my Colemak[eD] mappings.

With Extend you can add bigger chunks of boilerplate, like a set of tags and then move the cursor in between them. But you don't have that on a Mac, unfortunately.

Actually, I set up opening brackets on the home row before but was closing brackets more than I thought. Especially I have a lot of "()" in my code for argument-less functions so its useful.

I was also thinking about moving my altgr to the right of the letters (have one spare key between last letter and enter).
Also I noticed "=>" is quite useful.

Extend arrows is a hundred times better imnsho.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how the dead keys are supposed to work. Looks like you have to press and release your layer selection key, then press and release you selected layer, then type the symbol key? Do you then automatically return to normal mode? I don't quite get how you would type a sequence of many symbols.

I think I still prefer the more conventional layer system i.e. Shift, AltGr, AltGr+Shift, Extend, Extend+Shift, Extend+AltGr, Extend+Shift+AltGr - which should provide for more than enough layers that anyone could reasonably need. The trick is to define the modifier keys to select such layers in convenient places.

I guess it comes down to chording vs sequences, a bit like Emacs vs Vim. ;-)

Hitting the three keys in sequence instead of holding down AltGr(+Shift)+key is one more key press some of the time, but at the same time it's less cramped. Sean Wrona, world typing champion, says he uses CapsLock for Shift to avoid the chord because at high speed misfires can easily occur with chording! That's a concession to one more key press from a speed champion actually, which is an amazing piece of info. (I guess he should've used Sticky Shift instead? But maybe competitions don't allow special settings?)

Good thumb keys make chording better, and as SteveP points out chording is superior for long sequences. So chording definitely has its merits. But for single-shot stuff a "tap dance" like this can be at least as powerful, and allow for nearly infinite variations. And I realize there's a lot of power in single-shot layers. Currently I have two "chord-n-hold" Extend layers (nav/edit and NumPad) and two single-shot ones (coding snippets and powerstrings/kaomoji). The latter could more easily have been accessed through a "tap dance" sequence.

[Disclaimer: Some use the term "tap dance" to refer to the mashing of one key to access layers, which I think is a bad idea. It's much easier to press one key and then another and then a release, and that's as much of a "dance" so I'll call it that here.]

One hitch is that you need to be able to chain dead keys. Not all implementations support this. It's on my TODO list in EPKL but I doubt it'll happen next week.

I think it can work very well actually! But personally, I wouldn't accept losing neither the apostrophe nor any of the other normal keys to this "Mother of Dead Keys"! That's just me I guess. So... I'll have to think about how I'd do it. My first thought is that maybe ... maybe the Extend key could be a multifunction key with this dead key on tap – even with a timeout to it so if you don't hit another within a second it goes back to nothing?

In my Colemak[eD] layout I have 20 dead keys now! And I'd actually like a few more but there isn't much room left. These dead keys are all on AltGr+symbol keys so while they're fairly accessible they're not very much so. This dead key chaining concept opens up a world of interesting possibilities I must say. All the dead keys could be on letter keys so they'd be readily accessible once the MoDK was active. One would have to devise a good mnemonic system for them of course, but that should be feasible.

In EPKL, a dead key may release not just accented and special glyphs but anything really! So you could have a dead key layer for powerstrings and whatnot.

Wow, this is really interesting!

Thanks for a long reply. Yes, altgr is superior for long sequences of symbols. But I really like the idea of sticky shift and dead keys. Yes, its more keys but feels better.
You could replace numbers layer for a set of dead keys and it would not require 3 presses but those keys are a little stretch.

Also sticky shift could be a nice addition (as a colemak mod) as we usually need only one letter to be uppercase (pascal case or just regural sentence).

Yes, the number layer is bad.

How about moving modifiers to more comfortable places? We already are using caps lock for extend or delete, why not use additional key to the right of "O" to get altgr or even ctrl.

I was also thinking about explicitly exiting symbol layer but im not sure about the implementation.

Keyboard layers and deadkeys don't scale well for large and diverse alphabets or character repertoires (IPA, Chinese, math symbols if you need more than a handful, ...).  Better options are compose sequences, an IME, or a higher level formatting language.

Dead keys are perfect for what they were "invented" for: the extended Latin alphabet, since for the most part it's just a matrix of letter + diacritic combinations.

IPA or the extended Cyrillic alphabet for example are different beasts; there are many arbitrarily different extra letters (not a nice matrix), often similar/related (which makes it hard to create predicable and consistent deadkey combinations), and while you can of course create arbitrary deadkey combinations for anything you want, you will have to remember them.  Compose sequences OTOH can be made mnemonic and predictable, for example Compose+N+G for IPA /ŋ/, Compose+L+/ for Polish Ł, Compose-plus-minus for math symbol ±, etc...  I have a .XCompose file in my homedir (very portable) with loads of extra symbols that I occasionally need, but which would never fit on my keyboard.  Compose sequences scale quadratically and beyond, not just lineairly with number of layers and deadkeys. :-)

IME's are not just Compose sequences on steroids.  A very simple example is long press on many touch screen keyboards, eg. long press on A lets you select any A+accent combination, but also æ, without the need to remember anything but "looks like A" (speed will drop accordingly, of course).  Or they can be context aware, like advanced Chinese IME's (which I have no experience with).

Compose being Linux (or rather X11) specific, well... I just consider that a shortcoming of other platforms. ;-)

Ah. But then technically it's no longer a dead key but a layer lock key (and the exit key would be a layer release key). Dead keys may be considered layer latch keys (that is, the layer stays active until any key is pressed) which is related but not the same.

No, it makes sense for chained dead keys as well. It's just that in this case there's a latch queue, which then makes it a bit more similar to Compose.

Incidentally, I've made a Vietnamese layout that doesn't use DK chaining, in cooperation with a native speaker. It's in EPKL. The AltGr and dead key functionality took him a little while to get used to as he had used the usual IMEs in which you add the accent after the letter, but he seemed satisfied.

That's how I understood my native partner icedryst. It's a pity the people who transcribed Vietnamese first weren't more forward-thinking (although how could they have been...?): Had they used special letters for the extra vowels instead of piling on accents, the whole thing would've been much easier typographically. As it is, those multi-accent letters can often be a bit ugly and unclear in type. It would've helped if for instance they had used existing ligatures/slashes/bars instead, for instance æøåʉů could've come in handy!  ( のvの)

It's been a while since I have posted here. I found a layout which is quite comfortable for me.

So the basic layout is colemak dh wide, with small change - "," is replaced with dead key leading to symbol layer and "." is replaced with dead key leading to uppercase letters layer. I also use extend layer.

Uppercase letter layer is similar to shift layer, and exits after typing one key. When writing a sentece or programming I usually type one uppercase letter and then string of lowercase letters so it is enough in most cases. Also it is easier on fingers that holding shift.

My symbol layer is just normal symbol layer, but entered with dead key. I guess I could add access with alt as alternative when typing long symbol strings but it is enough for me. There is also one dead key which leads to second symbol layer.

The last layer is just second symbol layer. To access it you quickly press "symbol layer" dead key twice so it is quite easy to remember and navigate.

So this layout minimize the need to hold shift or alt, but leaves an optional hold feature too in case you need it.

I really like the placement of most keys, but would probably move some symbol keys if was using different programming languages.

So what do you think?