Hi everybody, very interesting to check all this !
Still a work in progress.
Panders to a French user of bépo + vim + i3.
What you see is not exactly what you get, insofar as I need to tell the pc that I’m using the bépo layout for it to do what’s displayed here. My .ino is technically still a qwerty except for the stuff that was moved around and the changes made to the function keys. I prefer to have it this way so someone else can switch to qwerty, azerty or whatever.
Vim related stuff :
- “esc” to the left of “a” because of a long time using this space for Vim everywhere else.
- Arrows shifted one key to the right, because that’s the way I’ve done it on my vimrc from the very beginning. For me there’s no point keeping them not exactly in the home row. Never had to regret that choice so far. Just needs more configuring everywhere, but aren’t we all geeky enough to do that…
i3 :
- “super” very accessible. Had to be right next to “shift” for chording. i3 was already the best thing since sliced bread, but these two keys being chordable just with my left thumb has made it downright glorious.
General reasoning :
- “return” just had to be a dedicated easily accessible thumb key ;
- There are three tab placings, way too much obviously, but I still haven’t decided which is best yet. I’d tend to prefer the fn+space one, but fn doesn’t play well with chording all the time, so needs more test driving. Right now my fingers really want to reach the “prog” key, which is faaaaar ;
- The only “shift” is the main left thumb button. Very very convenient, especially for my Vimium conf in Firefox / Chromium ;
- The right ctrl under the thumb was a shift, but after a few days of keyboardioing I realized I favoured the left shift even for the buttons on the left side, so I’ll try to do it this way. I do prefer this position for ctrl than where the butterfly button is, even though it’s a tad bit harder to reach for me (thumb preferred over index for ctrl) ;
- alt-gr had to be there given how important it is in the bépo layout. underscores are becoming awesome (alt-gr + space in bépo) ;
- I don’t give much of a damn about leds, so the dedicated button might change (and maybe survive through a chording with fn), though it is hard to reach for me, so while it may become an “ê” some day, there’s no rush.
- I’ve swapped the numpad button with the “any” key because I like its original place better for something more useful. For the time being, “ç” is fine there.
- “ç” being less important than “=” and “%”, these two keys have been assigned to places that are more easily accessible to me.
- “w” has always been a conundrum in bépo. I’m rather happy with what I’ve done with it, but typing almost more in English than French at the end of the day, I just haven’t reached reached a sense of closure with that little punk.
– “$ / #” is where it’s always been in bépo, but dabbling with PHP quite often, its easy accessibility is just phenomenal. Yay random chance 
I’ll save my .ino on my messy github some day.