Haha, I was reading the first section and scratching my head, thinking: “Why so complicated? Just use the International AltGr dead keys mapping. It is so much easier.”
OP invented the International AltGr dead keys layout and this is the story.
It's worth noting that the concept of a "Compose" key seems to have originated on DEC's specialized word-processors (physical machines which just did text editing), and that when Windows came on the scene, someone at DEC created "COMPOSE.EXE" which brought that functionality to Windows --- it continued working up through very late Windows 95 betas, then was broken and never updated.
There was a replacement in "AllChars" which is still on Sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars/ but hasn't been updated for a while.
Looks like:
is up-to-date, and if I wrote more, would definitely try out, but these days, either I write the accented character w/ a stylus, type out the LaTeX command, or use the on-screen keyboard via touchscreen.
I do not really get the point of layouts such as altgr-intl tbh (even without dead keys). It is fine if you want to write here and there the name of a person that includes non-english characters, but I cannot write actual text in that. Whenever I encounter this layout somewhere I just find it annoying even in english, though I guess dead keys is what actually makes it annoying.
Without dead keys it is def better, but even then I cannot write in said non-english language with that, instead of using one actual layout for that language, and I do not see why not just change layout. Granted, there are some small annoyances because punctuation marks may change place, but I find that easier to learn than using altgr to write letters.
Its extremely difficult to type hindi / sanskrit on qwerty boards.
even the article only talks of european languagues.
someone needs to find a better solution.
I'm Portuguese and have lived in the UK for over a decade.
UK keyboard layouts suck for writing Portuguese, because they lack convenient ways to type all the diacritics. Portuguese layouts (especially on macOS) suck horrendously for programming (curly braces and square brackets are inordinately annoying to type).
These days, all my physical keyboards are US (ANSI) layouts, and I use the US International (with dead keys) layout exclusively. It's the only relatively sane option that allows me to write both code and all the natural languages I'm liable to write on any given day (read: English, Portuguese, and some random French or German loanwords here and there).
As a Brazilian fellow, 100% agreed. US international is the least bad compromise I've found. I can't say I mind the dead keys too much. And I do enjoy that all combinations are sensible (i.e. key for the symbol + key for the letter). Memorizing the (not quite random but not exactly 100% logical either) position for some of the diacritics would be very annoying to me.
I guess I don't mind it too much because the standard portuguese keyboard layout also rely on dead keys for accented letters, instead of having dedicated keys for them. (Or at least the Brazilian Portuguese layout does, not sure about the European Portuguese layout). So that's just what I've always been used to.
Been using a very similar (in idea) layout: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/
The main difference seems to be in positioning of different characters on a quick glance?
I know that hn is heavily populated by people from the USA, that the author is dutch but a non-english language would be... every other language beside English.
Commenting on the actual text, his solution for the cedilla is awkward and is one of the first things I disable on any computer, because it is a extremely common letter in portuguese.
I agree that typing curly braces and square brackets on non English keyboards suck, but typing non English languages on an English keyboard sucks too. I made the opposite of your decision: I brought a laptop with my national keyboard and I switch to US layout when programming. That has had a curious effect on me: as my editor and my terminals have black backgrounds and everything else has a white one, something in my brain makes my fingers reach for keys according to the color of the background. I make many mistakes when I attempt to program in a white window (eg: type in gedit) or write in my language in a black one (eg: an md file in terminal.)
In particular, for anybody wondering, the non-english languages they refer to (wrt to the layout they talk about) are
> English (of course), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish
so basically all using some variation of the latin alphabet.
I have a standard English keyboard but I have mapped it in my mind with the German layout which includes ä, ö, ü and some other differences. As long as I don’t actually look at the keys I can write really fast with it, years of practice I guess…