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    Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    • Started by kentarov
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    • Registered: 28-May-2023
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    11-Jun-2023 07:07:03#1 Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    Hello,

    I'm using a Colemac DHm wide key layout on my

    macbook air M1 2020
    with BigSur 11.2.3

    Here is the keyboard layout file I created on my google drive:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HbVQCj … sp=sharing

    I made this layout file by following this tutorial:
    https://suragch.medium.com/how-to-make- … f607428372

    I want to use this keyboard layout as my input for my Romaji Japanese keyboard.
    However I'm having difficulty finding tutorials in Japanese nor English on how to do this.

    My current mac keyboard settings for input have the Colemac DHm Wide key layout on the visual, but when I type the standard QWERTY layout characters appear when I type on my keyboard:

    my QWERTY layout:
    https://imgur.com/pqevaNm

    romaji input looks like it's Colemac DHm but when I type I get QWERTY on my screen:
    https://imgur.com/iGjvyt2

    my Colemac DHm layout:
    https://imgur.com/ocvOIT7

    Please send any helpful links or tutorials in Japanese or English on how to use my Colemac DHm input for romaji Japanese typing.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    12-Jun-2023 09:18:56#2 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    A few corrections:
    – It's Colemak, not Colemac
    – The DHm mod is just named DH since it's the standard since 2020 (as well as 2014–2017).
    – When you combine Colemak-DH (alias Colemak-CurlAngle) with the Wide mod, the result is named Colemak-CAW.

    See the Colemak community page if you wish, or my BigBag pages ( https://dreymar.colemak.org ).

    As for enabling an IME to work with your layout, it should be possible (on Windows). There is, to my memory, a way of editing a registry entry for the IME to point to your "locale".

    However, another and maybe safer way would be to leave your system layout as QWERTY so you can still use the Japanese IME, and then remap layout using a keyboard hooking method. Such as an AHK script, or my EPKL program for Windows ... but you're on a Mac. There is the hooking program KMonad that should work cross-platform, so maybe you could try that. Or there's Karabinier which is Mac specific.

    On a side note: I made a scetch for a native romaji input method for EPKL, but it never became popular since it couldn't provide kanji. So it was never quite finished.

    Last edited by DreymaR (12-Jun-2023 09:30:53)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    26-Jun-2023 08:22:42#3 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    Thank you for the correction and the quick reply!

    I saw your posts here and asked a question there in hopes of other people on the thread there might reply as well:
    https://forum.colemak.com/topic/2368-en … em/#p24987

    I took a look at the cross platform hooking program KMonad here:
    https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad/blob/m … torial.kbd

    but it seems this is for creating a custom key layout. I already used Ukelele to make the layout I showed where I wrote "my Colemac DHm layout" in my first post. However after looking at Karibeiner it seems there may be a way to change the direct input to Colemak but I'm not sure how at the moment. Do you know of any good tutorials?

    thanks!

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    26-Jun-2023 12:16:31#4 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    No, I don't know how to make the Japanese IME use Colemak as its default layout. Leastways, not on MacOS. For Windows, it's a fairly hacky solution involving registry editing which is not for the weak of heart.

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    30-Jun-2023 03:03:54#5 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    Ah I see. thank you! I didn't realize that keyboard modifications are a thing only for direct key to character input. I see that other language speakers either choose a character from their language to directly correspond to the key they type in.

    Is it the registry layer that notes the english characters typed into the PC as Romaji, then does live translation into Hiragana, Katakana, or Kanji? This link explains this process in more detail.

    As you can see there are many IMEs in english, some free and some are not:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xxjU20 … drive_link
    this is a translated version of this article

    I want the live conversion feature the the default Mac OS Japanese IME has, but I don't know what layer this would be programmed in.
    I'm actually a software engineer (albiet not in I/O) so I would love to learn more of the technical details as well.

    I find it odd that only direct key to character typing is supported for most IMEs knowing that QWERTY is very inefficient and there are many non key-to-key convertible languages like Chinese and Korean, especially since the number of alphabetical keys are different from English.

    I don't want to use qwerty just for japanese but that seems to be the simplest option here.

    It seems JIS X6004 could be used as Colemak but the english keys are QWERTY and it seems it's just the Kana input that is Colemak like, not the actual English characters according to this link.

    I guess It's not bad to use QWERTY and Colemak right? If I use both my brain will be more flexible and my hands will have an opportunity to try different typing formats right? I'm afraid I'd get more confused and not develop as much muscle memory and my typing won't be as fast or comfortable if I use Colemak for English and QWERTY for all other languages.

    Should I just go back to QWERTY if I want to type in English, Japanese, and Chinese?

    What are your thoughts?

    Also how did you get so much knowledge in the area? I see you around so many threads!

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    03-Jul-2023 09:37:27#6 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    I have shared my thoughts above.

    In short: I believe the best and most robust way is to allow the OS to believe that you're using QWERTY, yes. But you can use software like Karabinier or KMonad to get a Colemak layout on top of that, which should give you the best of both worlds.

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    03-Jul-2023 18:46:43#7 Re: Colemac DHm Wide for Romaji Japanese Input

    Ah I see. Thanks!

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