Ravings on CS, OSs, PLs, SF, and other things geeky...

I finally got sick of switching keyboard layouts! All my keyboards are Japanese ones and I since I often have to type Icelandic on it I usually just switch the layouts. This had the unfortunate effect of moving various essential symbols in the Icelandic layout to keys that are not physically present on my Japanese keyboard. Instead it has various extra keys on the right side, along with keys to switch kana/romaji input.

The most notable irritants would be the non existence of the greater and less signs and the relocation of the pipe and slashes. To handle this I had integrated some of those keys to the unused Japanese keys on the Icelandic layout, but still it wasn’t entirely satisfactory since I naturally came to prefer the Japanese one. After all it corresponded nicely to the actual keyboard, not to mentioned having the slashes and the pipe keys in convenient places is quite essential to command line typing.

The worst case was when I was happily typing along in Icelandic and all of a sudden needed a greater or less sign and was forced to switch the keyboard layouts to Japanese and then back again. Now imagine a situation where I am typing up an XML document in Icelandic and you begin to get the idea.

So after some small experimentation to see what seemed to give me the best of both worlds, it eventually came down to placing all my Icelandic keys onto the Japanese layout, and to shift the existing Japanese symbols to the third and fourth level. That way the previous symbols are still accessible via the right Alt key. The only obvious exceptions was the slash symbol, which since replaced by THORN had to be moved a more convenient shift+acute. Now it looks something like this (click for large):

Now all that is left to see is if I can type at a decent rate with just this one new layout. If you are curious about keyboard layouts, download the layout here. To use just replace /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/jp with the downloaded version.