Different keycaps for international keyboard layouts [de-de]

Hi folks!

Finally my DevTerm arrived in perfect condition last week. Already put it together and had a lot of fun exploring its ins and outs.

One thing I was curious about: Might it be possible to replace the keycaps of the keyboard with different keyboard layouts? As a german native speaker I am missing my german „Umlaute“ (ä ü ö). I guess with 3D-printing it might be easy to create custom caps on my own but are there any .stl-file of the keycaps available and/or has anyone managed to remove/replace them?

Overall I was positively surprised by the quality of the keyboard. Yes it is fiddely to type but I was expecting it worse after the first feedbacks of different users here in the forums.

Greetings Nico

Have you tried removing a cap to see how it is connected? Haven‘t done that yet since I don‘t want to damage them…

I’ve removed one of them to deal with the strange feeling when pressing the Enter key…
Yes, they can be removed, by pressing the plastic snap inwards. It’s possible, but there is a risk of damaging the key.

Did you make a photo?

Can you draw a layout? I think I can have the manufacturer to build a sample out of it.

can we get technical drawings of the caps? Would be easy to create stls then…

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What do you mean “draw a layout”. You need a sketch of how a german layout should look like? If this is what you need then I can share one with you. I guess later this day I will be able to make a layout.

Greetings
Nico

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Ok guys, this is my first iteration of a somekind of “cramped” 85%-ish german layout of the DevTerm’s keyboard. As some of you might notice: There are some keys missing but I tried to ressemble the original location of some of the keys compared to a “normal” german keyboard-layout.

With my attempt I tried to keep the focus on writing actual german-language based text but also tried to keep some of the most important special characters (~ | # * and all the differend braces) needed for shell/terminal-manipulation and coding-needs. I also tried to keep special characters and german “Umlaute” (üöä and ß) usable by the same keypress they have on a standard layout meaning you have to use the same modifier to access them.)

Please have a look at it and feel free to improve it. As I mentioned: It is my first draft.

Greetings

Nico

PS: @AlexDuan this is what you wanted?

[Edit: Character “ß” was missing in my first draft – fixed)

For what it’s worth, in the meantime you can easily rearrange the keycaps on the DevTerm for something close to your preferred layout and then just change your system layout to match. Here’s my keyboard in Colemak layout:

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Pretty much, yeah. But to take it to practice, I think it’s better to have more community members to achieve an agreement. We are not familiar with the language, so we probably need more community members to join.

german user here, I like that layout…

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Thanks. I am already in touch with another german-speaking user (@tumalso) from this forum. He contacted me via PM and pointed out some important improvements. I‘ll create another draft and post it here with request for comments. Perhaps @stefan wants to be involved in this project?

Greetings Nico

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what would be involved? I don‘t have experience with managing keyboard layouts, I just use standard ones…

First of all I need native speakers of the german language who can check the usability of an alternative layout. As I already mentioned: My first draft had different characters missing and some of the placements where not useful for the everyday use.

I’ll post another iteration of my draft later this day. When it comes to keymaping, especially with X I am not that much in the topic so at least for this I/we need further assistance from someone else.

Greetings Nico

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I can have a look , but I am not sure I will find many errors… the only thing I would consider missing would be the € sign on the layout above, but I think I would just type it in ASCII with the ALT-key :smirk:

Just to chime in, I use this website to draft layouts for writing firmware, so it may be useful to you: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/

Ahw man! This is awesome! Just what I was locking for and an ideal replacement for my feared MS Paint skills! :sweat_smile:

Greetings Nico

Some advice regarding keyboard layout for languages:
I suggest sticking to existing standard layouts for the languages.
Then user only has to select the standard in /etc/default/keyboard/ and that’s all, everything will work. (I changed this way to Polish which has the same layout as US keyboards with the exception that right alt + some letters creates the special characters)
I we instead start creating entirely new layouts they will not be supported by the OS by default. User will have to install the layout definition somehow.

Also, on topic of keyboard layout changing.
I discovered that in the armbian-config, the Personal → Keyboard does not work, I don’t get any selection, I have to edit the aforementioned file directly. (A06)

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I have been able to use the native keyboard settings option to change my software layout, but then you need to go into IBus Preferences and make sure that in the Advanced settings make sure that the “Use system keyboard layout” option is selected, this will stop the IBus Prefs from overriding your chosen layout.

Believe me, you don’t want to play with all the different layouts of keyboards. But for EU version, I recommended you to have at least a DE or UK layout, so we can at least mark it into own language that we need.

I’m talking about EU version, because EU is using vertical Enter button instead of horizontal one.

You can find more information from Keyboard layout - Wikipedia

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