Add a Ctrl-Layer

[SmilingGit]

Hi,

Thank you for this brilliant piece of software, it helped me a lot!
Now, I haven’t found this in the docs and the issues: is there a way to add a Ctrl-layer? I want my custom layout, but would like to have ctrl+c, ctrl+v and the likes to work as usual (and the same for cmd+c cmd+v on MacOS). Is there a way to achieve this?

For anyone coming across this post in the meantime: for now, I use, as a workaround, the AHK-file, and I remove the last section about Ctrl. That works at least for windows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

All the best

[fabi1cazenave]

Thanks for your support, glad you like this project!

TL;DR: defining a Ctrl/Cmd layer is not possible at the moment. This would be a rather big piece to add, and I’m not sure it would be a cross-platform feature.

A first step could be to implement a “fallback Ctrl layer” option to:

• keep Qwerty shortcuts on macOS
• keep the unaltered shortcuts with AHK

That would imply we start supporting OS-specific options in the .toml file, because this is very likely not going to be a cross-platform feature.

The next step would be to define an external ctrl table, comparable to the altgr one, in order to define custom shortcuts (not just relying on the OS’ default).

[SmilingGit]

Thank you @fabi1cazenave for your reply!

I'm not sure for Linux, but what I know for sure is that it's possible in theory for Windows (normal layouts and AHK) and for MacOS. I discovered it when using more standard custom layouts that had this option, and it's handy for many shortcuts.

[fabi1cazenave]

For some layouts such as Dvorak, I’d say it’s needed. :-/

As discussed in #228, we’re going to create target-specific options. This should allow to define such Ctrl layers on the easier target first (AHK, macOS), then on the tricker targets (Windows, Linux) — thus breaking down this task into smaller pieces.

[SmilingGit]

In the meantime, I had a little script written, that takes the kalamine created keylayout file and adds a qwerty layer when cmd / ctrl keys are pressed. Also corrects a little bug in kalamine when the same modifier key has been inserted twice in the layout. (Otherwise, when opening the layout with ukulele, I get the error "The keyboard layout was invalid, with two actions that have the id xxx", and the layout is not loaded by MacOS.) The script is attached. It’s AI-coded, but pretty short, and for me the resulting layout works, so I’m happy! All the best!

add_qwerty_cmd.py