Trilingua Code Keyboards

A solution for the creative multilingual pro tired of switching between languages and special characters’ palettes…

Description

Trilingua Code Keyboards layouts improve the work of those who touch-type in English, French and Russian — like myself — plus write code daily, while insisting on typographic niceties and the preservation of industry-standard J K L shortcuts of audio/video editing software timeline control built for QWERTY.

Tip

No language switching via ⌃ ⌥ space required — if you stay bilingual.

I’ve created 2 keyboard layouts:

1. EN+FR Trilingua Code: combines the English QWERTY standards with French accented letters, specially optimized for coding. It includes an inverted number row for easy access to frequently used coding symbols and with a Shift and Alt integrates the French diacritics almost like on an AZERTY keyboard.

2. RU Trilingua Code: this layout mirrors the structure of EN+FR Trilingua Code, facilitating a fluid transition for those proficient in Russian as well. It still requires some work for a complete replica.

Note

Those are for MacOS, but you can find inspiration for your OS of choice.

Details of the layouts

No modifiers

Shift modifier

Alt modifier

Alt Shift modifier

Project Goals

• Multilingual Coding Efficiency: Aimed at bridging the gap between English, French, and Russian in coding environments, these layouts simplify the language switching process for touch-typing programmer-designer-filmmakers who want to preserve the access to familiar shortcuts.
• User-Centric Design: The layouts are crafted to be intuitive for both bilingual and trilingual users, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing typing proficiency.
• Compatible with built-in MacBooks’ keyboards: Yes, the latest split ergo marvels layered with ZMK are superb, but not always available.

Installation

MacOS

• download the keyboard bundles from the Releases
• unzip into your ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ user Library or /Library/Keyboard Layouts if you want all users to have access to the keyboards
• go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources or some harder-to-find-with-each-MacOS-release location to enable the keyboards
• most probably, you will have to log-out… gone are the easy days of MacOS 10.0
• I then tend to disable the built-in stock English and French layouts

All other OSes

• for now, I haven’t compiled anything for Windows or Linux
• you can build your own variants based off the images

Special features

• top rows optimized for direct access to various brackets ( ), [ ] and $ dollar sign used in programming
• “” «» typographer’s quotes for English and French in one place
• — m-dash
• – n-dash
• … typographical ellipsis
• → arrow frequently used in design and documentation
• ° degree symbol (yes, I do a lot of CAD @idelekka as well)
• ≈ approximate equality sign
• ø diameter symbol
• € Euro, £ Pound currency symbols

Uninstall default keyboards

MacOS

MacOS insists on keeping at least 1 Latin keyboard they ship. So when you cycle through the layouts — I’m using ⌘ Space — you’ll get English twice.

To remove the no longer needed layouts:

1. Change the current input source to the Trilingua Code custom keyboard layout.

2. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (if needed, convert the binary .plist to XML with plutil -convert xml1).

3. Remove the input source or input sources you want to disable from the AppleEnabledInputSources dictionary.

4. If there is an AppleDefaultAsciiInputSource key, remove it.

5. Save the new version of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist.

6. Restart.

Important

Logging out and back in is not enough.

Modification

Feel GPL-free to modify to suit your language (my German is decaying, hence the lack of its support, but you get the umlaut idea).

Feedback and suggestions

I’m continuously improving and evolving the keyboard layouts and welcome any feedback and contributions.

To-do

• complete the mirror of the EN+FR to RU
• remove several redundancies — I was testing different placements