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FAQ.md

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Frequently asked questions

Why use this and how?

So how does one use it to enter letters like ä or ß?

  • ä = AltGr + q
  • ö = AltGr + p
  • ü = AltGr + y
  • ä = " + a
  • ß = AltGr + s
  • ¡ = AltGr + !

You are probably that thinking AltGr + q, AltGr + p and AltGr + y don't look very intuitive, so what's up with that? Look at your keyboard and you notice that q is close to a, y is close to u and p is close to o. The reasoning is that many of the non-standard letters you want to type will be close to their base letter so that you don't have to look them up, you can explore and leverage your muscle memory instead.

  • A longer explanation which made me use his layout.
  • Here is another blogpost about this layout used in the original readme for this repository

There is one downside, at least for me, I unintentionally press ® and other funny letters at times when writing in German.

Where did this originate from?

The layout was created by xv0x7c0. I had to change my wording a bit to find it and started with a mix of WillerWasTaken and macOS's "U.S. International – PC" layout, then trying to port the Linux layout with Ukelele to macOS. xv0x7c0 is cleaner to read and complete.

Is there a difference to xv0x7c0's osx-us-altgr-intl or is this just a repackaged version?

It contains a few changes to bring it closer to the Linux layout which it was derieved from. If I had the time I would design my optimal layout for all platforms, but until then I'm fine with what I have on Linux, Chrome Os and Windows and prefer consistency.

You can view the differences in a diff viewer like vimdiff or Meld.

How can I customize this?

You can use Ukelele on a Mac or a text editor.

In scope patches and improvements are welcome. At the moment I'm not accepting maintainership for all and everything keyboard related that Apple does not provide out of the box. Sorry.

Where and how does one find the Linux files that define this layout?

If you have Gnome on Ubuntu you can follow through with the following: from the Settings app select Keyboard > Input Sources . This layout is called English (US, intl., with dead keys).

So we are going to seach for that:

$ grep -r 'English (US, intl., with dead keys)' "/usr/share/"
/usr/share/console-setup/KeyboardNames.pl:	'English (US, intl., with dead keys)' => 'intl',
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst:  intl            us: English (US, intl., with dead keys)
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst:  intl            us: English (US, intl., with dead keys)
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.xml:            <description>English (US, intl., with dead keys)</description>
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml:            <description>English (US, intl., with dead keys)</description>
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us:    name[Group1]= "English (US, intl., with dead keys)";
/usr/share/ibus/component/simple.xml:            <longname>English (US, intl., with dead keys)</longname>
/usr/share/ibus/component/simple.xml:            <description>English (US, intl., with dead keys)</description>

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us looks good, lets use that.

We need to have apt-file installed for the next step and its database initialized

$ apt-file search /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us
xkb-data: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us

Okay, that's enough terminal for now, so the package name which this file belongs to is xkb-data and after a few links (1, 2) we arrive upstream.

Where is the icon from?

It would probably have taken too long for me to find the right search terms, so I made an SVG myself in Inkscape to somewhat match the shape of the black icon which already existed in Ukelele. It looks like I got the color or opacity wrong. It's good enough for now.

Do you prefer any coding styles?

  • Google's Shell Style Guide
  • For Markdown in vim use set ts=4 sw=4 et ai cc=81 tw=80 fo=cq and wrap paragraphs with vip and gq where appropriate