Perl6-macOS-keyboard
Perl 6 has awesome Unicode support and I wanted easy access to more of the supported symbols so I built a macOS keyboard layout for Perl 6. I am from the UK so this layout is based on the British keyboard layout.
On the British keyboard layout the Option-§ key (top left) is a dead key so I added a new keyboard state that gave me freedom to create definitions for pretty much any of the keys. The base layout already covers a lot of extra characters in the Option layout but there are many more useful symbols in Perl 6.
The new P6 keyboard state is selected by pressing Option-§ which gives these mappings:
Pressing Shift while in the P6 keyboard state gives these additional mappings:
Installation
- Clone this repo
- Run
make install
- Open keyboard preferences
- Add the British Perl6 input source
Design
Hopefully my key choices are reasonably intuitive:
0..9
are ⁰..⁹ - SUPERSCRIPT ZERO .. NINEe
is ∈ - ELEMENT OFc
is ∋ - CONTAINS AS MEMBERu
is ∪ - UNIONn
is ∩ - INTERSECTIONs
is ⊂ - SUBSET OF=
is ≅ - APPROXIMATELY EQUAL TO[
is 「 - HALFWIDTH LEFT CORNER BRACKET]
is 」 - HALFWIDTH RIGHT CORNER BRACKET
The remaining symbols were placed to be symmetrical with or adjacent to existing choices.
Compatibility
This Perl 6 keyboard layout should work with all well-behaved macOS applications. I have tried it with Chrome, GNU Emacs (cocoa) and Terminal.
User Guide
The built-in Keyboard Viewer serves as a really nice on-screen cheat sheet.
New Features
PRs or Issues are welcome, especially PRs for other base layouts. This is a keyboard bundle so multiple keyboard layouts can be packaged together.