⚠️ DO NOT consider anything in this repo as stable, it's all WIP!

Foreword

Do you know the "United States-International" keyboard under Windows? I think this layout is very practical for international users who need to write a lot of non-ASCII chars in different languages (German umlauts, anyone?) while still preserving a regular US-layout.

... Wait, why would I use a US-layout as a German Software Engineer? One simple reason: Efficiency! Many keys (think of / ~ etc.) are way more easily accessible. Additionally, some IDE keyboard layouts (for instance in JetBrains products) are also counting on easy access to these keys.

However, I also sometimes need to use umlauts (e.g. when writing with my colleagues). This is where the layout shines: It's still possible to "easily" type them while still profiting from a more efficient base layout.

For example: Whenever I want to type an - äähm - let's say ä, I have two choices:

• <AltGr> + <q> → Immediately produces ä
• " + <a> → After pressing ", the layout awaits another char (the " functioning as a lazy modifier) and is not immidiately printed. Finally, when pressing the a, the layout "knows" that you truly wanted an a with umlauts!

Try it yourself! It's easier to get the point(s) then.

The first one is more difficult to remember, but the latter comes with a bigger downside: DEAD KEYS! REST IN PEACE! Whenever you literally want to write a ", a space is needed. And oh no - there are even more of these modifying keys, e.g. ^ or `. All these keys are dead! Let's resurrect them:

Introducing winlayouts-‍🧟‍♂️

Under Linux, using undead keys is a trivial task because there is a special option (nodeadkeys) for the altgr-intl keyboard, for example using xorg setxkbmap:

setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option nodeadkeys

Under Windows, there is no pre-defined magic layout for nodeadkeys and that is a huge pain. Consequently, we have to build it manually. One upside is that Microsoft provides a free tool named "Keyboard Layout Creator" for this purpose.

I searched GitHub and hurray - luckily, user @umanovskis already created one and provides...

[...] a layout that is like United States-International but removes the apostrophe ('), double quotes ("), circumflex (^), backtick (``) and tilde (~) as dead keys, while leaving the AltGr dead key combinations intact. (See README)

That's exactly what we want! I forked the repo to achieve three additional goals:

1. Provide reproducable builds using a PowerShell script that can be easily understood
2. Use GitHub actions to compile it:
   1. No need to download, install, execute the Microsoft tool just to compile your layout
   2. No need to trust a 3rd party to compile it without a possibly malicious intent
3. Aggregate other useful, special or international keyboard layouts in the future

That's what this repository is all about.

Available layouts

⚠️ Not stable yet

Name	Country	Variant	Description
usintl-undead	US	AltGr-Intl	Undead
usintl-undead-esc	US	AltGr-Intl	Undead, Caps mapped to ESC for efficient vim usage using a hack mentioned in the Colemak forum

Further information

To see a comparison between the original "United States-International" and the undead/nodeadkeys version for instance in your Git Bash, simply call less -R layouts/usintl-undead/diff-usintl-orig.txt. I dumped a git diff saving the respective files as UTF-8 before.