Custom keyboard layout

September 05, 2020

So i have for a long time used third party software to rebind my keyboard so that I could use the US keyboard layout when i program and still use åäö which are used quite a lot in swedish. and i didn’t want to switch keyboard layout just to type those letters.

I started with karabiner, but then the software stoped working with a macOS update. so then i used BetterTouchTool to rebind the left option key on my macbook and corresponding key to insert the correct character. but its not optimal to rely on a not free third party app, so I decided to build real alternative keyboard layout that functions in the way that i wanted to.

macOS

I used ukulele to modify the US layout to add the option+[ becomes å and so on

Windows

I used Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and did the same thing but with altgr+[ to åäö

Linux

didn’t need to do anything since gnome had a prebuilt keyboard that had exactly what i was looking for.

I uploaded both the mac and the windows keyboard layouts here