The one true keyboard layout

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that some of my posts are rather niche. I have to warn you now that this one attains a whole new level of nichey-ness. However, in my usual spirit of ‘this is interesting to me’ and ‘writing it down helps me to remember it later’, here it is. This article might also be interesting to you if you:Use an external keyboard both with and without a built-in laptop keyboard;Write code and need accented characters occasionally or constantly;Use multiple operating systems (particularly macOS and Linux, but I suspect this stuff is relevant to Windows too);Have a ZSA keyboard;Use a Wayland window manager on NixOS.Still with me? Allons-y!The problemKeyboard layouts are baffling. Of course, lots of things in computing (and life) are baffling, but keyboard layouts seem to confound me in unique and brain-straining ways. I need to be clear about what I mean by ‘keyboard layouts’ here, as I have used (and will continue to use) that term in other ways…