wismill/ergol

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

Ergo‑L

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).

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 ergol.toml

You’ll get a dist folder containing all of 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

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 !