Italian and ANSI layout

gianni

15 Jan 2015, 14:42

I'm thinking to adapt an ansi keyboard to the iso standard, for two reasons:
- availability of ansi keyboards
- I hate the iso anyway.... for example the "ì" and the "apostrophe ?" are impossible to reach, in my layout I will also move the apostrophe where the dash is (near , and .)

what do you think?

Image

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Cherry1990

11 Apr 2015, 01:18

I have your same problems, probably... I am using an US ANSI keyboard (the Italian layout is hard to find and I don't like it). I, partially, solved my problem with EurKey. It is not perfect but it works 90% of the time. A fully custom keyboard would be better but I do not have the time to build it now.

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idollar
i$

11 Apr 2015, 08:23

Hello,

I use ANSI and I can reach all the required keys without any problem.
They are a little harder to find in Europe but this is not really a big issue for me. It is a matter of looking around or making your own.

Regarding special keys, my recommendation is to configure the keyboard to use ANSI US with dead keys. This will allow you to type special characters in an easy and logic manner. ' + o = ó for instance. ~ + n = ñ.

Another advantage is that the dead keys combination is present in all the operating systems that I am using.

In any case the decision on which layout to use is very personal. I started to use ANSI US forced at work. Since then, I converted to the real religion ... :-)

ndree

15 Apr 2015, 23:33

Hi, I'm new here.

I've been thinking about this as well for a while and I came up with pretty much the same layout gianni proposed.
Although there are a few issues to address.
1) Angle brackets are lost to the left shift key, so they could moved to the Z and X keys with the CTRL+ALT modifiers combination.
2) There's no Alt Gr key on the ANSI layout, so curly brackets would require three modifiers held down at the same time (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT) opposed to two on ISO keyboards (ALT GR+SHIFT), even though the three modifiers combination also work on ISO keyboards. For this reason, curly brackets could be moved to the A and S keys and activated with the CTRL+ALT combo. Technically the right Alt key could be replaced with Alt Gr.
3) The tilde character (~) is missing in the standard italian layout, so we can eventually assign it to the backslash key with the, yet again, CTRL+ALT mod.
4) The capital accented (È) is also missing. It could be moved on the E key in place of the euro glyph as it can be done with CTRL+ALT 5 as well, or assigned to a new key (I've currently it to the Q)

The image below would better explain.
Image

gianni

15 Apr 2015, 23:52

I haven't thought in detail about symbols yet. But for sure your í is difficult to reach, as the ' which I would prefer to have at the right of the dot. Surely you can use the alt gr by remapping the os keyboard layout, or simply by modifying the keyboard layout if you have a programmable keyboard.

ndree

16 Apr 2015, 10:51

Then you might want to consider this layout.
Blue keys would be for punctuation
Yellow for regional (in our case accented vowels)
and Orange for math.
Brackets would need to be assigned somewhere else.

Image

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