Martin's virtual lair

Recently I switched from the standard Qwerty keyboard layout to Dvorak, which promises faster typing and less finger travel when touch-typing. The standard Dvorak layout is optimized according to the pattern and frequency with which letters appear in the English language, thus making it particularly useful for those who use English as their primary language on a computer.

Being a German speaker, I used to install two keyboard layouts (English and German) and toggle between them by pressing both Shift keys. This would give me easy access to the German layout (with which I grew up) to type the special characters ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü and ß. The inconvenience of memorizing two keyboard layouts was minor, because only two of the alphanumerical keys (Y and Z) swapped their locations. In contrast to this, the difference between English Dvorak (top) and German Dvorak (bottom) is much larger: the keys R, T, U, I, H, D, L and Z all change their location.

Do I really want to learn not only one, but two Dvorak layouts? After all, I can memorize only so many layouts, and I'm not getting any younger. So I decided to stick with US Dvorak, and to remap the German special characters onto that layout via the Alt modifier. As an added extra, the currency symbols for Euro, Pound Sterling and Yen get mappings as well. Here's what my Dvorak layout on steroids looks like:

The lower red keys are accessed by pressing the right Alt key (Alt R), and the upper ones by pressing Shift and Alt R together.

How to set up these keybindings in Linux:

First, we read out the current keycode table (in our case US Dvorak) and write it into a file with the name .Xmodmap in the home directory:

xmodmap -pke > .Xmodmap

When logging into a desktop session Linux automatically checks if an .Xmodmap file exists in the home directory. If it does, then its values are used for the keyboard layout. Opening the file with an editor, the relevant lines for us are the following:

keycode  28 = y Y y Y
keycode  33 = l L l L
keycode  38 = a A a A
keycode  39 = o O o O
keycode  40 = e E e E
keycode  41 = u U u U
keycode  47 = s S s S

Editing these lines as follows will give us the additional shortcuts:

keycode  28 = y Y y Y yen
keycode  33 = l L l L sterling
keycode  38 = a A a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode  39 = o O o O odiaeresis Odiaeresis
keycode  40 = e E e E EuroSign
keycode  41 = u U u U udiaeresis Udiaeresis
keycode  47 = s S s S ssharp

Here, the fifth column stands for pessing the key in combination with Alt R, and the sixth colums for pressing the key in combination with Shift and Alt R.