kdevo / winlayouts-undead

⌨ Custom Windows US-International keyboard(s) with no dead keys, plus automation tools written in PowerShell for compilation (via MSKLC) and installation (still a WIP).

I am a free-minded and passionate software engineer, tech enthusiast and maker from Aachen.

In my bachelor thesis from 2018, I examined how well Ethereum can be integrated into existing business processes of the FH Aachen. By the start of 2020, I extensively explored the data science field and got fascinated by machine learning projects that improve human interaction. I recently completed my Master of Engineering in Information Systems Engineering where I took a deep dive into the emerging field of Reciprocal Recommender Systems (RRS) from a research and practical point of view. Bringing these views together, you can now fully read my thesis online and experiment with Chaos, a first of its kind framework – with the goal to enrich the RRS landscape with novel approaches for connecting humans.

After graduating, I have worked at gridX, a smart grid company which aims to make sustainable energy more accessible to everyone. Recently, I travelled through South East Asia to experience the various cultures, learn and reflect from a professional and private perspective. I am now offering software engineering services to companies that strive to have a positive impact on our world. Interested? Drop me a message!

In my free time, I am developing open-source software projects, transforming ideas to their physical representation by 3D printing, tinkering with electronic stuff and more! I love the idea behind free software and I use Arch, btw.

winlayouts-undead's Issues

Explore and support different keyboard hacks via dynamic patching

As of now, only the caps=esc hack is supported (and hardcoded). It would be quite fun to support various keyboard hacks and re-mappings that are disallowed by the official MSKLC from MS.

For this, dynamic patching of the keyboard layout header files is needed.

See also #1 for an example.

Use a GitHub action running on a Windows VM to build the installer

Blocked by #2

Known bug: Re-login necessary

After installing a new layout with wlud, a logoff followed by a login (re-login) is necessary until the layout pops up in the selection under menu "Edit language and keyboard settings".
On some tested machines, after selecting the layout, another re-login was necessary.

It would be optimal to find a solution to completely eliminate this nasty re-login which is not very user-friendly.
Apparently, Windows only loads the layouts on each login, however maybe we could restart "the process that manages keyboard-things" accordingly in the future (or a similar "hack", since there is no official documentation on MS site).

Implement pure self-contained PowerShell installer

Right now, this repo is not very useful for normal users: An installer is needed.

Since I did not find a way to easily use the command line utilities provided by MSKLC to build the installer that pops up when using Project -> "Build DLL and Setup Package" via GUI:
Let's build a simple PowerShell script has a smaller footprint, I think that it is "good enough" to build a PowerShell-base installer that is self-contained (i.e. includes all DLLs in various architectures) and extracts these to a file from Base-64 which is then installed to the %SystemRoot%\System32 folder (at least on x64 systems).

The installer is currently drafted as installer-wip.

Option to remap to cursor/arrow keys

Attempt to find a solution to e.g. map (h, j, k, l) to (VK_LEFT, VK_UP, VK_DOWN, VK_RIGHT) for more ergonomic usage.
Of course, using external automation software such as AutoHotkey already makes this possible, but implementing this natively on a very low layer has more benefits (e.g. more efficient, no 3rd party software, switchable via layout, ...).

Please note that it could be impossible to accomplish this task using MSKLC and we therefore might need to patch the DLL source files (in msklc/inc/) when extracted.