The “US - Brian” Windows Keyboard Layout

Key Mappings

Key Combo	Character	Unicode	HTML Entity	Description
AltGr+'	ʻ	U+02BB		The Hawaiian ʻokina
AltGr+[	“	U+201C	“	Left Double Quote
AltGr+]	”	U+201D	”	Right Double Quote
AltGr+9	‘	U+2018	‘	Left Single Quote
AltGr+0	’	U+2019	’	Right Single Quote
AltGr+-	—	U+2014	—	Em dash
AltGr+2	°	U+00B0	°	Degree symbol
AltGr+.	…	U+2026	…	Horizontal ellipsis

“AltGr” refers to either “Ctrl + Alt” or “Right Alt” in this layout.

Motivation

I frequently write Hawaiian words like Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu, and I want to be able to easily type them without omitting the ʻokina in each word. Windows (as of Windows 8) has a Hawaiian keyboard layout, but that layout turns the apostrophe key into the ʻokina and requires the use of AltGr+' to get the apostrophe. That doesn't work for me, especially because I'm a software developer and programming requires frequent use of the ASCII apostrophe character. Thus, I created this layout primarily to make it easy to type the ʻokina without hindering my programming.

More generally, I am interested in typography and so I want an easy way to type some characters like “real” quotes, especially in programs that don't auto-correct “dumb” quotes into “smart” ones.

Finally, people who live in Hawaiʻi frequently make fun of the terrible weather in the rest of the US, and for this it is useful to be able to easily type the degree symbol (°).

Design choices

In general, I tried to map each added character to keys that are used for the characters that are most similar to the added character. Also, I made the ʻokina mapping the inverse of the official Windows Hawaiian keyboard layout.

In math, it is most common to nest expressions in parentheses and then brackets, e.g. “[-b ± √(b² - 4ac)]/(2a).” In American writing, we nest single quotes inside of double quotes, e.g. “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Thus, I mapped single quotes to the keys that have parantheses and I mapped double quotes to the keys that have the brackets.

How to build and install the layout

1. Install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service pack 1.
2. Install Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4.
3. Open US-Brian.klc in Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.
4. Select the “Project > Build DLL and Setup Package” menu item.
5. You will be warned that some characters in the layout aren't present in the US locale. Ignore that warning.
6. When the build finishes, you will be prompted to open the folder where the generated files were placed. Then you can double-click the appropriate .MSI package to install the keyboard layout.
7. Restart your computer. This step may not always be required, but in my experience things only partially work (or don't work at all) without a restart.

If you modify the layout without changing its name, you must first uninstall the old version. In fact, as far as I can tell, you must uninstall the old version, then reboot, then install the new version, then reboot.

The optimal setup

In addition to installing the “US - Brian” keyboard layout, do the following:

• Disable the Ctrl+Shift shortcut to switch between input methods in “Control Panel” > Language > “Advanced settings” > “Change language bar hot keys”. This shortcut gets accidentally triggered too often when programming. Instead, use the [Windows]+[Space] shortcut.
• Remove the “US” layout. It is redundant with “US - Brian” and it just gets in the way when switching keyboard layouts. Note that “removing” isn't the same as uninstalling; you can always add the “US” layout back.
• Add the “United States - International” layout.

Then you can use [Windows]+[Space] to switch between the layouts. This makes it easy to switch to the “International” layout to type words like “à la carte” and “El Niño” and then switch back.

License

CC0.