Should UltimateKEYS share (more) similarities with US-International or EurKEY (or AltGr-WEur) ?

[pieter-degroote]

Well, as for now, the keyboard layout shares some similarities with the existing 'US-International' on Win/Linux :

• It has å/Å on 'W' (near A).
• It has ø/Ø on 'L' (near O).
• It has ñ/Ñ on 'N'.
• It has ß on 'S' (plus capital Eszett 'ẞ', like EurKEY 1.3).
• It has œ/Œ on 'K' (corresponds with Linux implementation of US-International).
• It has € on '5' (usually printed on the keycap in the Netherlands, sharing US QWERTY).
• Where possible, the dead keys for the accents share their corresponding keys : `/~, ^, '/".
• The additional ISO key, next to the left Shift, is explicitly defined as backslash/bar.

Some other characters have been added in a natural way, where possible :

• Diaeresis on the vowels : ä, ë, ï, ö, ü (not on 'y') (see also EurKEY and AltGr-WEur).
• It has ç/Ç on 'C' (see also EurKEY and AltGr-WEur).
• It has the quotation marks “” and ‘’ on their corresponding places on the round brackets at 9 and 0 (see also EurKEY and AltGr-WEur).
• It has the French quotation marks «» and ‹› on their corresponding places at [/{ and ]/} (see also EurKEY and AltGr-WEur, and partly for US-International).
• It has the Portuguese letters ã/Ã and õ/Õ on the left of the 'Backspace' key at -/_ and =/+.
• The other accented vowels got their places as close as possible to their corresponding vowels : acute and grave accents corresponding with EurKEY; circumflexes near their vowels, where possible.
• The copyright sign (©) is on 2/@ since it has a similar round shape like @ (there can be discussed whether it should be on the main layout...).
• The section sign (§) is on 3/# since it usually has something with numbers, like the number sign (its place on the main layout is also open for discussion).

Also note that places for the accented letters correspond mostly with those from EurKEY, some placements might be a bit more optimized for German, right now.

The special key above the Enter key on the image allows for typing (AltGr) : ×, ÷, et cetera...
The same key above 'Enter' allows for typing different currency symbols (AltGr+Shift).

The dead key on AltGr+M allows for typing the Greek alphabet, along with some other stuff like superscript and subscript numbers...
The dead key on AltGr+Shift+M allows for typing different, mostly mathematical symbols (except some like × and ÷).

All available keys on the layout got definitions for their four states (default, Shift, AltGr and AltGr+Shift), making full use of all available positions (only the ISO key next to left Shift has only two states, since it is normally not present on regular US (ANSI) keyboards).

And indeed, this keyboard layout finally got rid of ð/Ð (eth), þ/Þ (thorn), ý/Ý, ÿ/Ÿ and ij/IJ :

The letters 'eth' and 'thorn' are only used for Icelandic, plus some other smaller languages/dialects.
Letters like ý/Ý and ÿ/Ÿ are also rarely used in Western Europe.
The digraph (or ligature) ij/IJ belongs to Dutch (and Flemish variant), although virtually everyone in our regions considers it as two separate characters, and also types it that way.

See also : https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/xkeyboard-config/-/issues/280

=> Please note that this discussion is now partly obsolete, since UltimateKEYS has shifted to a different approach. In recent releases, the only dead key actually present on the main layout is the 'Compose Key' (Multi_key), featuring 2-key compose sequences.

[pieter-degroote]

This discussion is now rather outdated and, as a result, closed.