Improving my keyboard
17 Sep 2014Because I'm living in France, all my computers have a standard French keyboard layout. It is based on the azerty layout, with all the frequent French characters in easy access (eg: é, è, à, etc).
It is different from a classical qwerty layout in various ways, the most notable being that the numbers on the number rows are activated by pressing Shift. On a classical qwerty keyboard, pressing the 2 key will issue a 2. In my case it will issue a é. I need to press Shift+2 to get a 2. And AltGr+2 gets me a ~.
Why am I talking about that ? Because I'm also a developer, and I write code everyday. And code is not like prose, the characters with special meanings are not the same. We use and abuse (, {, ;, -, _ or [. Some of these characters I use very often, and due to my keyboard layout, I often need to press Shift or AltGr to get the needed char.
This, of course, struck me as not very productive. There has to be a better way. So I dig up a bit and found xmodmap that is used by linux to bind a keycode to a keysym. A keycode is what is send to your OS when you press one of your plastic keys on your keyboard. One physical key on the keyboard equals to a keycode. Each keycode can have one or several modifiers (like Shift, Control or AltGr). And each of combination of keycode + modifier(s) equals one keysym, which usually translate to a character, but can sometime have special meaning (like Return, Backspace or the F keys).
With xmodmap, you can manually configure which keycode sends which keysym. So I've updated my own xmodmap to move some of the special chars I use often to place I can access easily without having to move my hands too much.
To do that, I mostly took advantage of the AltGr modifier that is currently underused. This modifier is mostly applied to the number row (and pressing AltGr and anything on the number row is not the easiest thing to do).
The most important change I made is to add AltGr+i to create a - (dash) and AltGr+o to create a _ (underscore). Those two chars are overused when coding, and having them on those keys allowed me to type them much much faster without having to move my hand on the keyboard.
The others little changes I made were to add AltGr+h as # (hash, the mnemonic is that a capital H looks a bit like a #). Following the same idea I put the pipe | on AltGr+j. I also put \ on AltGr+u. These are keys easily accessible and I use them often.
Finally, the last two important bindings are AltGr+r to produce a `. The default French keyboard layout does not have a key for the backtick, so creating mine was a huge timesaver. The last one is AltGr+q to get a ~ (tilde).
I also tried to put [ and ] respectively on AltGr+k and AltGr+l but I never use them.
You find below the xmodmap I use. Put it in a ~/.xmodmaprc file and run setxkbmap fr && xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc to apply them.
keycode 27 = r R r R grave
keycode 30 = u U u U backslash
keycode 31 = i I i I minus
keycode 32 = o O o O underscore
keycode 38 = q Q q Q asciitilde
keycode 43 = h H h H numbersign
keycode 44 = j J j J bar
keycode 45 = k K k K bracketleft parenleft
keycode 46 = l L l L bracketright parenright
As I recently had to work on a Windows machine, I installed AutoHotKey and created this little script to emulate the same shortcuts :
<^>!r::Send ``{Space}
<^>!u::Send \
<^>!i::Send -
<^>!o::Send _
<^>!q::Send `~{Space}
<^>!h::Send {#}
<^>!j::Send |
This little changes were a huge timesave for me, hope they gave you some ideas too.
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