>>susam+(OP)
Some nice symbol selection here. It’s a great thing to customize your keyboard layout. On the Mac side, there’s a nice tool called Ukelele: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

>>susam+(OP)
The older neo keyboard layout and its newer variants like bone (https://neo-layout.org/Layouts/bone) follow a similar approach to provide more symbols, and they're additionally optimized for typing.

These layouts provide several additional layers which give easy access to ASCII special characters, greek letters and frequently used math symbols.

Also there is layer 4, which is pure gold in itself. It provides cursor movement keys, backspace, enter and a numpad close to your home position. I personally couldn't go back once I had tried it.

(Beware that these layouts include the umlauts äöüß as they were designed for german writing, and make use of the additional key for '<' in the lower left corner of german keyboards)

>>fogof+Qq
Compare the following two examples:

5 − 2 = 3

5 - 2 = 3

The first one is correct. It contains the Unicode character 'MINUS SIGN' (U+2212). The second contains the Unicode character 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D) which is not suitable for representing the minus sign in mathematical typesetting.

Also, see https://i.imgur.com/ngFI3JB.png for a few examples typeset with MathJax. The first example has a proper minus sign (correct) whereas the second one contains a hyphen (incorrect). By the way, in plain HTML, the character entity reference "&minus;" displays the minus sign, although I just use MathJax when proper mathematics typesetting is required in HTML pages.

>>susam+(OP)
I guess a possibility would also be to use one of these https://ergodox-ez.com/. They allow quite some customization.

>>susam+(OP)
Obligatory old-timers the APL keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#/me... and the Symbolics LM-2 "space cadet" keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi... It seems that Dyalog is selling new keyboards for its APL, too: https://www.dyalog.com/apl-font-keyboard.htm https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/images/Business/products/us_r... .

>>leoc+ZY
Get the real deal: https://www.pckeyboard.com

You can get an APL keycap set for your existing Unicomp keyboard, or do a custom order for any of their models. They will even print you custom keycap sets: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Buttons

The trackball Unicomp is IMO the best keyboard being manufactured (right now they are out of stock until Q3 2021): https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/ClassicTrackball

Buckling spring is just a superior (although less durable) key switch technology than the Honeywell switches used in Symbolics keyboards (and most other keyboard switch mechanisms as well). One thing that the Symbolics keyboards did right is having both the APL and Greek legends on keycaps.

But none of this matters if you do not have the right software. GNU Emacs greek and TeX input-methods, and the C-x 8 iso-transl keymap (which you can extend) makes writing mathematical symbols really easy.

>>susam+(OP)
The new official French AZERTY standard is pretty good too :

http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

Hopefully the various administrations will start to push it to replace old keyboards...

There's also a BÉPO version, which would have been even better, but I guess that would be too much inertia to fight?

>>susam+(OP)
I wrote myself a small plugin for Sublime Text that allows me to enter common math symbols as unicode characters by virtue of a selection popup. So, for instance, I hit Ctrl+m, type "subs" (for subset – it does fuzzy matching), hit enter et voilà, I get "⊂". Finally, math in LaTeX is no longer a pain to read!

While it works very nicely, it's of course unavailable outside Sublime, so I've been looking for alternatives and came across the following projects:

https://github.com/ibus/ibus (example: https://github.com/sphaerophoria/ibus-memebox) https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji/

Hopefully at some point I'll find the time to adapt them to my purposes.

>>susam+(OP)
interesting, the "Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator" MSKLC seems to be moved, I just downloaded it one month ago to setup US English Internaitional to be identical as what is found on linux.

New link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102... Remember to turn on windows features for old .NET before you install MSKLC

>>reaper+3V
Depending on your version of MacOS, I'd recommend Karabiner-Elements for remapping: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

>>hyperj+Zq
Ukelele is one of those amazing apps that you love more the less you use it. I've been using this keyboard as my daily driver since 2007:

https://github.com/2grep/ScienceNotes

>>reaper+3V
If you want to do something like the article, with a custom layout (e.g. defining characters for Option and Shift+Option), then what you want (as hyperjeff mentioned above) is Ukelele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

>>susam+(OP)
I like the approach that the AUCTeX and/or CDLaTeX modes in emacs take: if I want Greek letters or math symbols, I hit the backtick, then the mnemonic or binding for the Greek symbol/operator I want. I know you can’t extend this to Twitter or something, but I would never want to anyway. (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/11.88-extra/tex-ref.pdf)

>>susam+(OP)
Very cool that the author had a custom keyboard made with their keymap printed on it.

Personally I like being able to type math symbols on occasion but don't do so often enough to benefit from a custom keyboard layout that I'd then have to memorize. I didn't have a good way to do this until about a year ago, when I learned about Espanso [1] which is a cross-platform text expander. I installed it and set it up to substitute various (vaguely LaTeX-inspired) macros to UTF-8 strings. For example, typing the following keystrokes

    x = R cos(:phi) sin(:lambda :minus :lambda:nought)

becomes x = R cos(φ) sin(λ − λ₀)

I chose ':' as a prefix for all my macros but this is just a self-enforced convention; you can configure a substitution for any sequence of keystrokes. Since I gave all the characters names that made sense to me, I don't have to think much when I type them.

A few of the substitutions I get the most mileage out of:

- The Greek alphabet, both upper and lowercase (:theta → θ and :Omega → Ω)

- Double-struck letters for numerical sets; e.g. :RR → ℝ

- :infinity → ∞

- :neq → ≠

- :pm → ±

[1]: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso

>>susam+(OP)
I wrote myself a very similar keyboard layout a while ago: https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey. It differs in being primarily oriented towards linguistics rather than maths, but I’ve ended up being able to type almost a superset of the same symbols that this one allows. Aside from this, the main difference appears to be that Lengyel’s keyboard layout is more ergonomic, at the cost of allowing less symbols.

>>layer8+0B
On Win10 the quick and dirty solution is to select a character on its own, copy it to the clipboard, then, in your clipboard history, pin that particular selection. Nearly every time you use it you'll have to scroll to the bottom of your clipboard history and then probably back up again a bit, but that's not all that bad.

Of course you HAVE already turned on your Windows 10 clipboard history, RIGHT? ;) https://www.howtogeek.com/671222/how-to-enable-and-use-clipb...

>>reaper+3V
To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/akamchinjir/osxkb

>>1996+dx1
Not strictly zero :

https://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00279741.html

Also I think that Cherry made some ?

But of course, until the State will start enforcing the norm, it will remain an amateur-only thing.