This keymap provides an easy way to type German umlauts and eszett on the US-International keyboard layout while also resurrecting its dead keys. It was made for the Melody96/YMD96 keyboards.
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Esc | F1 | F2 | F3 | F4 | F5 | F6 | F7 | F8 | F9 | F10| F11| F12|Print| Del | Home| End | PgU | PgD
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~` | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 0| - | = | BkSpc | NLk | / | * | -
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Tab | Q | W | E/€| R | T | Y | U/Ü| I | O/Ö| P | { | } | \ | 7 | 8 | 9 | +
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_LOC | A/Ä| S/ß| D | F | G | H | J | K | L | ; | ' | Return | 4 | 5 | 6 |
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LShft | Z | X | C | V | B | N | M | , | . | / | RShft | Up | 1 | 2 | 3 | En
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Ctrl | LGUI | Alt | Space |RAlt|_OPT|Ctrl|Left|Down|Rght | 0 | . | ter
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To type umlauts, use the CAPS LOCK key and a, o, u or s. Upper-case works with shift on top. Dead keys (` and ') will now immediately produce that character, without requiring hitting space.
Additionally, CAPS LOCK + ', ;, { and - produce the chars corresponding to their original position on the QWERTZ keyboard. This is meant to avoid mistakes while re-wiring your brain to use this layout.
I wanted to have an ANSI keyboard that would be comfortable to type on in German while also being universally compatible with every operating system.
Hence I settled on US-International as it ships with all operating systems I can think of. Here I encountered two downsides:
- Unintuitive positions of umlauts (Q, P, Y)
- Important characters for programming behind dead keys
One layout that mitigates this is EurKEY. It places the umlauts at an intuitive position (A, O, U). I used this layout for quite a while, but after a while two things stood out to me:
- Installing an external layout is often not possible, especially when handling work computers
- Bending the thumb repeatedly to reach for Alt-Gr on longer German texts was putting stress on the thumb joint
This QMK layout is still a work in process. I have yet to reach >100 WPM on it like I did on ISO QWERTZ with dedicated umlauts, but I'm already much faster on it than on EurKEY or stock US-INTL.
- CAPS LOCK is gone for good
- Not suited to type accented characters as the dead keys would be used for that
- Dead keys cannot be held to repeat, they will only produce one char at a time
cd qmk_firmware/keyboards/ymdk/melody96/keymaps
git clone https://github.com/davidramiro/km96-usintl-de.git
cd ~/qmk_firmware
make ymdk/melody96:km96-usintl-de:flash