b0pol / ergol

A Colemak-style keyboard layout for French-speaking typists and programmers.

Ergo‑L

(in English hereinafter)

Une disposition de clavier ergonomique optimisée pour le français, l’anglais et le code.

• Disposition optimisée pour le français et l’anglais;
• Couche AltGr optionnelle, optimisée pour l’enchaînement des symboles de programmation;
• Conservation des raccourcis usuels : Ctrl-{Q,A,S,Z,X,V} (Ctrl-C est décalé, mais reste faisable d’une main);
• Support de tous les caractères spéciaux utilisés en français (diacritiques, majuscules accentuées, lettres entrelacées, symboles de ponctuation…);
• Chiffres en accès direct.

English

A Colemak-style layout for French-speaking users.

TL;DR:

• a Colemak-style keyboard layout optimized for French and English;
• most common keyboard shortcuts are preserved (like in Colemak);
• use a dead key for the most frequent accented characters;
• use the AltGr layer for programming symbols.

This layout claims to be better than Bépo for French, better than Dvorak for English and better than Qwerty for programming. Check the stats !

Layout

The dead ★ key gives access to all acute accents, grave accents, cedillas, digraphs and quote signs you’ll need to write in proper French:

… and the AltGr layer is fully dedicated to programming symbols.

The default layout allows to write in English, French, German and Esperanto easily.

More information on the website (in French).

Availability

Kalamine is available on Debian Unstable. It is automatically installed via the xkb-data package.

Install

You’ll need the latest version of Kalamine to build your own layout. We highly recommend using pipx, once you have it installed (by following their guide), you can just run the following command:

pipx install kalamine

Download the layouts/ergol.toml file in this repo and build the layout :

kalamine build ergol.toml

You’ll get a dist folder containing all the drivers.

Then, to install Ergo‑L, follow the install section of Kalamine’s repo, and you should be good to go !

Install (Linux only)

xkalamine is a linux‑specific tool (shipped with kalamine) to easily install keyboard layouts on Linux. You can drop sudo if you use wayland, but it’s required on Xorg.

sudo xkalamine install ergol.toml  # Install the layout

Then switch to Ergo‑L using the following command:

setxkbmap fr -variant ergol  # Switch your keyboard layout to ergol

Troubleshooting with ubuntu / wayland

There is a weird issue where Ergo-L works fine with some applications (phpstorm, gnome,...) but not on others (libreoffice, terminator). The deadkey remain for two chars instead of only one. (ex: a[deadkey]sen should display aéen but it displays aéèn instead.).

This issue is solved by adding at the end of /etc/environment the following lines:

INPUT_METHOD=ibus
GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus

Make Your Own !

If you wish to modify the layout, the layouts/*.{toml,yaml} are human-readable ASCII arts of the final layout. You can easily edit them, then run make (or make watch) at the root of the repo to generate the .json files used to benchmark layouts on the stats page.

This repo contains all of the code for the Ergo‑L website, so you can run the page locally to try your prototypes !

Edit Corpora

The different corpora can be found in corpus/, mainly fr.txt and en.txt which can be edited to change the type of text used (for instance if you don’t write like translators of Miguel de Cervantes, or if you want to test with your own emails).

If you have multiple source files, you can thus merge them using the merge.py script, for instance:

python3 merge.py file-fr‑1.txt … file-fr-n.txt > fr.txt

Once this is done, the statistics file can be generated using the chardict.py script. Note that for this step, you don’t want to have parasitic .txt files in the corpus directory, or their stats will be generated as well.

python3 chardict.py

For the sake of completeness, we add that specifying a single file after the command generates the json stat file for this specific corpus.

Run a Local Server

Hugo can be used to serve the site, it automatically watches and live-reload the pages upon file changes, however you still need to have make watch running to ensure that the .json files are generated upon modifying human-friendly layouts in layouts/*.{to,ya}ml.

You can thus run your local instance of the Ergo‑L website either by running hugo server in the www/ directory, or via:

hugo server --source www/

By default, the server will run on port 1313: http://localhost:1313/

The stats page is now accessible on http://localhost:1313/stats/#/ergol/ol60/fr!

Note: This solution supports live-reload for most parts. While it’s not a problem while editing the content, some stats are not fully refreshed with live-reload. You may have to manually refresh the stats page after editing a layout or a corpus to have the correct version of them.