Remapping keys?

[Javaru (Mark Vedder)]

@merlin

I want to configure my keyboard so that pressing a key without modifiers will send one keycode (let’s call it alpha), and pressing the same key with shift held down will produce another keycode (beta). In general, alpha and beta might be modified by a (virtual) shift. This would allow me to completely decouple the symbols and numbers that share keys on a standard keyboard for historical reasons, but which have no particular logical association, and recombine them in a way that makes much more sense.

In particular, I want one key that produces ( when typed unmodified, but { when typed with shift held. I also want a | (unmodified) / 9 (shifted) key. This cannot be done even with a combination of TopsyTurvy (good for reversing the shift of a key, but not remapping just the shifted keycode) and ShapeShifter (change the shifted keycode, but shift is always applied to that keycode). And even if it can be made to work, the resulting sketch will be quite convoluted.

If, on the other hand, I implemented it as a layer, I can do that remapping…but then I can’t use a mouse to do a shift-click or shift-drag (or all the keys in that layer must have shift applied, which defeats the purpose).
. . .
If nobody else wants it, it makes a hell of a lot more sense for me to pay @algernon to do it in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me, and that’s what I might do in the end.

@merlin - I’m hoping to do something exactly like what you describe. And like you, I could try and dust of my C knowledge (which I’ve done nothing with for far too many years), learn Arduino programming, and learn about key codes and the like, and maybe get something working in a few months time… or I could ask (and sponsor) a Subject Matter Expert like @algernon to do the work. I’d be happy to join you, and any others that would like to join us, in sponsoring a plugin, say via algernon’s Patreon page, that would allow “legacy-shifted characters” (let’s call them) on a non-shifted key/level, and a different character (legacy-shifted or not) on the shifted layer of that key. Basically, to visualize the ideas you’ve discussed, things like this:

┏━━━┓  ┏━━━┓  
┃ { ┃  ┃ } ┃ 
┃ ( ┃  ┃ ) ┃ 
┗━━━┛  ┗━━━┛  
┏━━━┓  ┏━━━┓ 
┃ 9 ┃  ┃ ? ┃ 
┃ | ┃  ┃ " ┃ 
┗━━━┛  ┗━━━┛