UncleZeiv's corner

KTouch lectures for programmers

A tweakable Python script that generates KTouch compatible lectures for programmers who want to learn or improve how to touch type. This basically means that a lot of punctuation characters are thrown in the mix.

The final levels can get very frustrating, what with all the punctuation and numbers everywhere. You have been warned!

• github repository

Alternate UK international keyboard with dead keys for accented characters

If your own language needs accented characters, chances are that someone messed up the US/UK keyboard design to cram these in somehow. The Italian keyboard is especially poor as many commonly used accented characters are actually impossible to type. This is unfortunately true of all capital accented letters and that’s why, for instance, you’ll frequently find «E’» rather than «È» in printed materials.

Moreover, it is often the case that to accommodate all language-specific characters, all the punctuation gets moved around, making many characters commonly used in programming difficult to type.

A good solution is given by the “United Kingdom” layout found in Ubuntu, where «;», «#», and others can be used with Alt-Gr as dead keys to produce acute and grave accents respectively. Please note that in contrast to many “Dead Keys” layouts you can type «’» with a single keystroke.

Using the very useful Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4 I was able to partially port this behavior over to Windows.

• klc source file for Keyboard Layout Creator (201201)
• executable to install the keyboard layout (201201)

The keyboard gets installed as “United Kingdom Extended (Ubuntu style)”.