Scandinavian Keys

Help and Getting Started
1

Hi! I’m completely new to the keyboardio, and trying to learn how to use it. I’m struggling with the Scandinavian letters, and I’m locking for a solution that allows me stick to the US layout.

What I have tried is to create dynamic macros for key chords as described in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/keyboard-shortcuts-for-international-characters-108fa0c1-fb8e-4aae-9db1-d60407d13c35. That does not seem to work, neither as a macro or as a key chord.
Secondly I though I might use the custom key code to describe the letters there, but I’m not able to figure out what the right code would be.

So I’ve gotten my self stuck and I’m not sure how to solve the issue.

The letters in question: æøåÆÅØ.

Any good ideas to help out???

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2

I use those Norwegian letters. It’s been a while since I messed around with this, but here are two ideas. 1) On my Keyboardio Atreus keyboard I used the Chrysalis software to map physical keys to characters. Somewhere in there I could choose a keyboard layout that has the Norwegian letters, and then I could use the mouse to point and click to map those letters to physical keys. 2) I have a Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard with US layout. I chose the layout “US International” in my operating system on my computer. Then created a macro on the keyboard; the combination of key presses that according to the US International layout will produce the Norwegian character. I assigned the macro to the one physical key that I wanted to produce that Norwegian character.

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3

I struggled with this too.
You can’t fix it with firmware alone. The OS settings also matter.
There has been several posts about it in the past.
Happy to help if you need more help

4

I have the Model100, and previously the Model01. The firmware is set to US layout, and when I want to type Finnish or Swedish, I change the computer’s layout to fi.

For an odd non-English character, I’ve bound the Num lock key on the computer to Compose, so that Num lock followed by " and a gives me ä. There’s lots of other combinations, of course.

The only key actually miss in the Finnish/Swedish layout is å, for which there isn’t a physical key. The ö and ä keys are in their usual place (modulo the slightly unusual physical keys).

5

Thanks a lot for your input on this. I had the idea to try nr. 1 as well, however if I have the system layout in US, then this is not respected by the OS. I also tried the macro solution, but I struggled with it, the key chords that I found online seemed to only work for some MS programs. I need it to work for text editors as well.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong.

6

Hi Lasse, I would love have some help on this. Right now I have the US Layout set-up on my windows computer, which I use for work. Are there any other settings I need to look into as well?

7

Hi Liw, thanks for the response. I’m not sure I’m familiar with Compose. Is this a feature of some sort?

8

I have made some progress today. A video on youtube help me set-up the us international keyboard.

Secondly I’ve set set-up three dynamic macros to represent the æ, ø, and å, which in my case I’ve mapped to fun+u/i/o for now. Not sure how this will work on my linux box yet, but I will try :slight_smile:

9

A “compose” key is a feature in some key maps where you type the designated compos key, and then two other keys, and get a character that doesn’t have a dedicated key.

I have bound in GNOME settings the num lock key to be a compose key. That lets me type num lock followed by o and o to get ° (the degree sign), or num lock " a to get ä, or num lock o c to get ©.

I don’t know if the keyboardio firmware has compose support natively, I use it on the computer side only.

10

Hi,

I am on vacation - so away from my Model 01 and 100…

I tried many combinations, including the Compose key. And in the end it all depends…
I work as a IT consultant and I can’t install software on my work laptop. And on windows getting a Compose key requires just that.

So I generally go with solutions that require as little as possible on the OS side. But forget about the dream that there can be no requirements on the OS side. This also unfortunately means that layouts will be OS dependent (more on that later).

So for Windows I go with the US International keyboard

Which means that all useful keys are available under the Alt Gr key.

If you are unhappy with the actual placements of the keys on the Alt Gr like me. You can find some software that changes that. On windows you can make your own keyboard layout and I had that for many years, but given my current constraint I can’t install custom layouts…

What I do is I map the Alt Gr key to “Shift to layer” And then I create a layer, where all keys are mapped to Alt Gr + what I want. I have å under a, ø under o and æ under '. YMMV

Also I actually use Colemak layout, so I have remapped my entire layer 1 to produce colemak on Windows without software changes. And I just accept that the physical keyboard on the work laptop is still querty (which can be useful, when I have coworkers around)

Now I also use a Mac - and this is completely different setup. Here I use Colemak, which is built in to MacOS. And so strange enough this means that the keyboard in Chrysalis is just a querty layout, since the OS takes care of the the colemak part. The alt gr part is similar - some remapping to make windows and mac more similar. It still differs, but I have learned to accept that (future TODO).

To make the same Chrysalis layout work on both Windows and Mac I use more layers. So I have windows on layer #1 (colemak), #2 (fn) and #3 (altgr) – I have mac on #4 (querty), #5 (fn), #6 (alt gr)

This means that the keyboard runs windows when it boots up. To change to mac I have mapped fn+something to the function that changes layer, not shift as usual. And the reverse mapping of course.

Lots of information! I hope you can figure it out. I have to be present with my family now :sunny:

11

Unrelated but a good tip:
Map arrows as a reverse T shape on the right hand home row.
And importantly map U+O to ctrl+arrow.
This makes keyboard driven text editing soooo much easier!
See this picture:
image

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12

It is not possible to support it natively as the HID standard unfortunately doesn’t define a Compose key. Therefore you have to resort to OS support.

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13

Really good tip. I personally use jkl; as the arrow keys (vim style shifted one key to the right, so no need to move the hand to navigate, just push fun ). I’ve set h & ’ as ‘‘hyper’’ left/right. Thanks for the proposal.

14

I found another solution that worked out of the box on linux and windows. Using the correct us international keyboard æ/ø/å can be found with altgr (butterfly) + z/l/w respectively, and with shift for the capital letters. With this solution there’s no need for any macros or additional software. Thanks for the help everyone.

15

I’m swedish but type mostly in English. I have an Atreus and since I rather not waste keys on characters I don’t type that often I use Keyman desktop with a swedish-postfix layout (inspired by the one in Emacs with the same name). Much more comfortable than composing keys with umlauts and accents I think.