The diagrams below illustrate the most basic ways to use the izKeys (ee-zee-keys) keyboard layout. How to access the other keys? The info may be extracted from the table summaries of layout of the Latin and Cyrillic personalities (but these tables do not explicitly list the heuristics…). For more information, see this (you may also want to inspect the documentation of the toolset used to generate this layout: here, and here, but they are currently in a complete disarray).
Here, we completely ignore the questions how to enter math/IPA/UPA symbols (about a thousand is possible!), and exotic Latin letters (more than a thousand of them) — let us just mention that the concepts/mneumonics helping one remember many of them are “mogrification rules”, “GreenKeys/RipeKeys” and “BlueKeys”. (The reasons for a character to appear on a particular key are listed in the mouse-popups when hovering on characters; these terms appear there, but so far I did not manage to write a coherent explanation of these terms.) What we discuss here is restricted to the most frequent Latin letters, as well as input of Cyrillic/Greek, and of Business symbols.
When a certain key or key combination is undefined, the keyboard produces the visible bell symbol ♪.
So one should not be surprised that this is the most frequent character in the diagrams below!
The diagrams are color-coded using outlines, character color, and character background. Outlines relate to mnumonic rules; green and blue outlines indicate that either mneumonics are based on the position of this character, or the characters are otherwise important, thus made easily guessable. On the opposite end, characters with brown outlines are hopeless to guess using heuristics, one must memorize them. The key assignment of characters with yellow outlines cannot be guessed immediately, but there is an approximate heuristic: it assignes a few possible positions to the character, so one can quickly find the needed key using 3–4 experiments; these heuristics are either explicitly mentioned, or related to sound/shape of character w.r.t. the Latin key it is put in.
We use white outline to indicate symbols
„ ‚“ ‘ ” ’« ‹ » ›‐ – — ― ‒ ‑〃 ‵ ‶ ‷ ′ ″ ‴ ⁗ ´ which were replaced by “surrogate” symbols in the typewriter age (more about this
below).
In all diagrams, yellow characters denote prefix keys; other colors indicate visual bells, and
characters assigned to
AltGr-keys (when many characters are displayed on the same key). The meaning of background colors is the same as in here
and here. This frame denotes
characters which have 3 case forms (lc/uc/titlecase); and this frame indicates that
the uppercase cannot be encoded as one Unicode character. Sometimes the whole key also has a special background color;
it indicates that the positioning heuristic is “based on diagonals” — more details below.
Trivia: to show this page correctly, one may need to install extra fonts (Deja vu,
junicode, Symbola; unifont
has a very good coverage, but it also [as of 2011] has a special glyph inserted (explicitly — instead of using
.notdef!) for missing codepoints — and this
severely interacts with a choice of better fonts). Some fonts have some glyphs wrong (I have seen
wrong directions of arrows, wrong choice of OXIA vs VARIA, or DASIA vs PSILI — especially on ρ).
Sometimes one should better zoom in (Control-MouseWheel, Control-+, or from menu; Control-0 to return back) in browser to see details/differences of diacritic marks.
Note that each colored letter-diagonal contains exactly one vowel (outlined in blue); the diagonals guide the quick-access to the ¨,´,`-accented vowels (discussed in the next section).
Are the etched symbols on your keys very different? Tough luck… — you will need to mentally rearrange the diagrams
to suit your keyboard. (Keyboard drivers access keyboards
basing on key scancodes, which mostly depend on the position of the key, not on what is drawn on it.) The mneumonics used here
depend a lot on the etchings being as above. Trivia: ASCII encoding has SPACE and 94 other characters defined; this leads to 47 keys on the standard US keyboard
(2 characters per key). The main variation in layout is the position of the \| key; sometimes
Enter⏎/←Backspace
keys have a different shape, and this key is moved about to compensate. Trivia: the position of this key differed
on the initial XT/AT/Enhanced keyboards; apparently, keyboard
manufacturers think that this gives them a license to freely move it around…
ISO keyboards have one “extra” key. Above, it is the other key
\| (shown here to the left of SPACE). Its position varies a lot between keyboards;
sometimes it is marked as < >; sometimes it is positioned to the left
of Z; on many US keyboards it is omitted altogether. These
variations in position and markup do not matter — if the key is present, it behaves
as indicated; we do not put “important” characters at this position. Likewise,
Brazilian ABNT and
Japanese JIS keyboards have
yet another key on alphanumeric rows: on ABNT it is next to the right Shift, on JIS next to Backspace.
(Our diagrams do not show this key at all; for this layout, we do not plan to use it other than as Compose key.)
AltGr is pressed All accented letters in this diagram are also available on easier-to-remember multi-key sequences (starting with prefix keys); so remembering positions of the most of characters in this diagram is not required: they are needed only to speed up the typing.
Pay attention to the difference between letters
and symbols — we call them characters when we do not care about the distinction.
“Letters” are parts of words; all the other characters are “symbols”. Symbols with white outlines denote “no-nonsense variants”
of surrogate typewriter symbols ", ', `, - etc. (Trivia: With invention of typewriters,
many [tens?] of different symbols where jammed into one “surrogate” symbol to economize on the number of keyboard's keys;
essentially, surrogates make no sense standalone. For decades. we were forced to use surrogates and deduce
what was actually meant basing on context; nowadays, we can do better; see -This-,
“this”,
this′, this ″,
`that´,
‘that’ and T H A T.)
For this particular diagram: characters with green or blue outline are those for which people can immediately guess their position on keyboard. Since easily-guessable, these positions are a very valuable property, and are “set in stone” — they win in conflicts with other positioning heuristics. (Possible exceptions on guessability are ºª§; but if you saw the diagram above once, you have a good chance to guess them anyway. Euro € is at the position which is etched on many keyboards nowaday (compare with this discussion).
Trivia: in earlier versions of this keyboard, · and § were on 7/& key; then I
discovered Blickensderfer No. 5 (1896)….
This was convergence in action! (But now I think that
√ is much too similar to 7 to miss an opportunity….)
On the opposite end of the guessability scale are letters with brown outlines: they take ad hoc positions which must be memorized. In between on the guessability scale are letters on the colored diagonals (two ⤡-diagonal on the left-hand side, and four ⤢-diagonals on the right-hand side) — they may be calculated using a simple rule. Each colored diagonal has one vowel on the “base” layer, and three ¨,´,`-accented variants of this vowel are put on 3 keys on the diagonal — from top to bottom.
Example: observe the red diagonal on the right with ü/ú/ù.
Unfortunately, this diagonal is the only “clean” example: the other diagonals contain letters which are “set in stone”,
so the by-diagonal rule loses. When a very important letter loses in playing chicken, it yellows (look for yellow outlines) and
is “bumped away” one position across the diagonal (preferably down, if possible). (Observe the red arrows!) The extremely rare letters ë,
ỳ and ï are just discarded; the more frequent ì withers and becomes brown-outlined.
Summary: How to type Blue/Green outlined characters may be guessed immediately. For no-outline characters on colored diagonals there is a very simple rule to locate them. If one also remembers the “bumped away” rule, one can locate 4 letters with yellow outlines. If one wants to quick-type the remaining 3 brown-outline letters (and no-outline symbols), one must memorize them.
Trivia: Did you notice ẞ = upper-cased ß? (These are different letters!)
Unicode has many wonders... (this link leads to an
extremely long thread!).
Why ê is blue? It is the only set-in-stone accented vowel...
A remark on prefix key. The color on the diagram indicates that pressing AltGr-$ produces a prefix key.
It also shows that this prefix key is denoted as £; but keep in mind that using the symbol £ here is just
a notational convention!
By itself, a prefix key does not make any sense. What is important to know is how to describe succintly the semantic of “what
it does with the following letter/symbol/etc”; one may ask what happens when it is followed by space; and one may ask what
happens when it is pressed twice. The answers are: it finds business-symbol/currency-symbol which matches best the given letter,
or modifies the symbol by adding a vertical line; it produces ␠; it produces £. Hence the notation
above is quite appropriate.
In general, the prefix keys of this layout try to do likewise: when we denote a prefix key by a certain diacritic
mark, we want: prefix + a letter (or AltGr-letter) produces the letter+diacritic with the diacritic as close
to “this notation” as possible; prefix + a symbol mogrifies the symbol in a way similar to the name of the diacritic
(say, acute may make “with sharper corners” version of the symbol, and ring-above may produce a “rounded”
version); following it by SPACE produces the standalone diacritic character; and typing it twice produces the
corresponding combining character. (Moreover, one can produce more standalone variants by modifying SPACE
by Shift or AltGr; one can get more combining variants by prefix + ' — and one can
use Shift/AltGr on Shift or '.)
The base layout of Cyrillic personality follows the only phonetic layout which has a remote chance to be called “standard” — one from X11. Letters with brown outline must be memorized. Positions of letters with green outline can be guessed with two tries (but if forgotten, they may lead to a [quickly going away] confusion):
The most important other thing to remember is that if a letter (say, Ю) replaces ASCII
symbols (such as ` and ~), the symbols are available via combination with AltGr.
And Ъ/Ё are available also by combining AltGr with Ь/Е.
(Compare with AltGr-combined diagram below, after the next diagram.)
Base Cyrillic layout as visible from Latin personality after AltGr-Space (so “RipeKeys” replace shared
symbols; colors as in the previous diagram).
AltGr Cyrillic layoutHere is the base Cyrillic face (essentially, consisting of Russian letters) with
AltGr-bindings added in red. (Since AltGr-keys are easiest to type after the “raw” keys,
these red letters are those we assign the largest priority after the Russian letters:
those from the modern Slavic Cyrillic-based languages, XIX century Russian, and Kazakh. For the
rest of Cyrillic letters, see below.):
Color codes are as above; positions of the letters Ѣ,Є,Ә are artificial,
but still may be guessed on the third try, while positions of Ѓ and Ј must be memorized (heuristics:
Ѓ overflows down from Г=G; the position of Ј “is questionable”. For the rest of the letters,
if one knows that they are indeed prioritized to be on AltGr-bindings, one can immediately guess
on which key.
Prefix keys are in yellow. In addition to £ (which is Business-prefix=AltGr-$ — same as on Latin face), two
Cyrillic-specific prefix keys are: AltGr-' introduces “extra” Cyrillic letters
(and fractions), and AltGr-^ introduces titlo-forms and “exotic” Cyrillic characters.
As usual, pressing the prefix twice produces the corresponding combining character: the stress mark and titlo.
AltGr-' in Cyrillic personality; double-AltGr-SPACE
in Latin):
Letters with yellow overline are not in the most obvious positions, but at least there is some hope to remember some heuristics. This includes ҼҾ (Abkhazian CHEs) and ҒӺ (stroked GHE's) which “slided to the left” from Ч and Г, and Komi Ԋ on comma [;-].
The rules to enter fractions are very simple: AltGr-' DIGIT enters a fraction with
the digit in denominator; AltGr-' Shift-DIGIT does the same for numerator. If another
precomposed fraction with the same denominator/numerator is available in Unicode, add AltGr
modifier to access the other fraction. Example: there are four fractions with denominator 8: ⅛, ⅜, ⅝, ⅞
(in order of numerators). Now AltGr-' 8 accesses the first one, ⅛; pressing AltGr-' AltGr-8
accesses the second one, ⅜. All precomposed fractions can be entered this way (Example: ⅝, ⅞ may be entered via
digit-in-numerator AltGr-' AltGr-% and AltGr-' &). Trivia: there is another way to enter Unicode fractions: use superscript digits for the
numerator, subscript digits for the denominator, and separate them by FRACTION SLASH available via GreenKey Shift-SPACE /
(as well as on AltGr-/ SPACE) to get something like ¹²⁄₃₅ (the very narrow “bounding box” of FRACTION SLASH ensures the nice look).
Titlo-forms, power-of-10 multipliers, and “exotics” (the prefix is AltGr-^ in Cyrillic personality; triple-AltGr-SPACE
in Latin):
Note the Shift-trick: since titlo-forms
are not available in upper-case, we highjack the Shift-position and put the titlo-form of an “extra” letter
(one on AltGr-' LTR)
to AltGr-^ Shift-LTR; see keys Ю and Я above.
Also, note exceptions: ◌ⷵ on S, titlo-Ꙉ (djerv) ◌ⷸ on D, ᴫ (small capital л) on L, and ᵸ on N (which is a “modifier letter”, not a
“combining letter”). Power-of-10
multipliers are available on the corresponding digit keys 3...8. (Trivia: all multipliers but “thousands” ҂ are combining.)
Ocular О's ꙨꙪꙬꙮ are on digits 1...3 (with or without AltGr). In addition to these exceptions, yellow outlines are
on heuristically good ZEMLYA/DZELO Ꙁ/Ꙃ on 0, Ҹ which “slided left”, and Komi letters NJE/ZJE/DZJE on comma ;-) (here — and on the “extra” layer).
Base Greek layout as visible from Latin Personality (on GREEN=Shift-SPACE prefix, so GreenKeys replace symbols):
Positions of Greek letters with brown outline must be memorized (heuristics: θ and Q are both O with an extra stroke; y is one half of ψ). The rest of base letters is guessable: either phonetically,
or, if conflicts appear, visually (the base letters coincide with the
Galaxy layout; the mixup of χ/Χ (chi; on x) and ξ/Ξ (xi; on c) is unfortunate, but it is shared by many other
layouts). Two green-outline letters pre-combined with diaeresis must also be memorized if one wants to enter
monotonic Greek; ; and ? give the Greek flavors (Trivia: the latter is deprecated — use the Latin ;
instead).
Polytonic Greek is produced with 3 prefix keys \, [ and ].
Pay attention to vowels (blue outline) above, one on every color-tinted diagonal; compare with this GREEK [ layout
(with AltGr-bindings added in red):
(For a moment, ignore the key 3#.) Observe that all characters have aspiration ῾ (visually similar to [),
that the other accents depend on the row and color (black or red), and the base letter depends on the (colored) diagonal.
The rule: Prefix \ with a key on a diagonal of a vowel
produces the accented vowel: the row determines the accent:
the top letter row gives the polytonic variant ´ of acute accent (OXIA), the low letter row gives the grave accent ` (VARIA),
and the number row gives the circumflex accent ῀ (PERISPOMENI). The middle letter
row gives none (of these 3 accents). Combine the letter with AltGr to obtain the combinations with diaeresis
(DIALYTIKA; applicable only to ι/Ι and υ/Υ) or iotization (YPOGEGRAMMENI=ͺ or PROSGEGRAMMENI=ι — on lower/upper case). To combine with aspiration, replace
\ by one of [ and ] — depending on the shape of aspiration accent: ῾ (DASIA) and ᾿ (PSILI).
Rho ρ/Ρ takes aspiration signs as if it were a vowel; the corresponding “diagonal” contains the only key `.
GREEK [ AltGr-@ produces ᾯ (here GREEK is GREEN=Shift-SPACE).
And here is why: @ is Shift-2; due to Shift, the result is in uppercase;
the key with 2 and
@ is on the green diagonal which contains the vowel ω/Ω; hence one gets an accented Ω. It is iotized (note ι-like diacritic below) since @ was combined with AltGr;
the key with 2 and @ is on the number row, which adds the circumflex (and in Greek it looks like ~);
finally, since we used [ “instead of” \, this adds the aspiration ῾ (DASIA) looking like [.
Observe the red symbols on the rightmost red diagonal: they
are standalone polytonic diacritics! (The diagram above is as seen from Latin personality; from Cyrillic one there are usual complications related to
many ways to produce ёЁъЪ — for example, the key # does not
access number-symbol ͵ as it does from the Latin personality.)
Summary for standalone: to enter a standalone polytonic diacritic, pretend that you
put it on (non-existent) OMICRON-DIALYTIKA (in other words, the last key in the sequence should be AltGr- on
a key in the rightmost red diagonal — the diagonal of . DOT). What to do with DIALYTIKA/YPOGEGRAMMENI/PROSGEGRAMMENI which would require a “second”
AltGr modifier? Replace it by Shift! (Exceptions: removing this Shift converts
the standalone PROSGEGRAMMENI to (surprise!) YPOGEGRAMMENI; and Shift converts PSILI to CORONIS. There are
other ways to get combinations like DIALYTIKA AND VARIA: for example, by adding GRAVE to DIAERESIS via
AltGr-` AltGr-;. Trivia: Note also that there is no standalone DIALYTIKA symbol; use the standalone ¨ DIAERESIS via
AltGr-; SPACE instead.)
Numeral signs are accessible on keys 3 and #. On the prefix /
they are “as expected”: 3 gives the lower one, and # the “normal” one (duplicated on the prefix ]).
(On the prefix [ this pair is inverted, to fight with ъЪёЁ-confusion in access from the Cyrillic personality.)
To join them, standalone monotonic diacritics ΄,΅ are available on AltGr-3 and AltGr-#.
Macron and breve: Observe that by the rules above, GREEK \ LTR with LTR from
the middle letter row would produce an unaccented vowel. To avoid waste, they instead produce either a vowel with breve (VRACHY)
or with macron (vowels α/υ/ι may take them — the other vowels already have separate forms for shorter/longer variants),
or LUNATE variant symbol ϵ for ε (on d). To get breve, proceed as if
you want to get unaccented vowel; to get macron, do the same on the next key to the right or left (so a/j/k
produce ᾰ/ῠ/ῐ, s/h/l produce ᾱ/ῡ/ῑ, and d makes ϵ). To clarify, here is the diagram of GREEK \
(observe also Zodiak symbols on Shift-NUMBERS row):
Trivia: Numeration of Zodiak constellations starts on
the spring equinox; so the first 20 days of Nth month is in
the Zodiak sign number N-3 or N+9. We put 10th,11th,12th signs on keys 0 ), - _
and = +; to get 13 for the price of 12, the sign ⛎ (for the not-Zodiacal but ecliptical constallation
Ophiuchus) is put on ~.
Monotonic and “special” Greek letters can be accessed on the base face by combining with AltGr. On vowels, this adds
tonos ΄ (acute accent). On consonants, it produces special forms (final, scientific etc) and archaic letters.
Here is the Greek face with AltGr-bindings added in red:
Observe kai ϗ — this is one of exceptional cases when a lower-case letter is put in a Shifted position.
(As a case pair, kai is available via the “Coptic prefix” `.) Note also that red letters with yellow outline
are guessable by simple heuristics (“one of the sounds” for stigma Ϛ, visual for the rest). (Moreover, digamma Ϝ is “on top of”
Ψ which “is a di-Y”, and we use ϔ as “the shifted variant” of ΰ.)
The prefix key ` allows one to enter Coptic (and multitude of others Greek-related symbols).
AltGr-t, koppa Ϟ/Ϙ on AltGr-Z/C and sampi Ϡ on
AltGr-x);
j,
fay/fai/FEI Ϥ on v (or AltGr-f);
AltGr-LTR where the LTR
is the initial letter of the name on the Wikipedia page of 2012
LTR is the first letter of the Unicode name for DEI/tee/ti Ⲇ and KHEI/khay/xai Ⲕ.
Here is the AltGr-GREEK ` layout with AltGr-bindings added in red:
Note the Coptic dash (plus more dashes), DOS' dingbats for Control-range characters (on Shift-DIGITs,
and AltGr--, AltGr-_), and (obsolete) Zhuang tone marks on AltGr-DIGITS (from 2 to 6),
and stroked + latinized ι/υ/λ as ᵼ/ᵿ/ƛ. Additional “semi-randomly assigned” AltGr-letters: Bactrian sho Ϸ on b; ½-H heta Ͱ/ͱ on 1;
yot ϳ on j; Pamphylian digamma Ͷ/ͷ
on g; san Ϻ/ϻ on m, ϒ on U, lunate sigmas ϲ/Ϲ on v, reversed lunate sigmas ͻ/Ͻ on o, reversed epsilon ϶
on e, kai's Ϗ/ϗ on q, (reversed) dotted lunate sigmas ͽ/Ͽ ͼ/Ͼ on r and y, and archaic sampi Ͳ/ͳ on n.
(inverted) Ohm Ω/℧ on W/w.
Trivia: Latin variants
of names of Coptic letters are not standartized; so we use 3 names: Unicode name in capital, and two lowercase names
from Wikipedia pages: of 2012/08 and of 2012/01. Since important for finding the positions, the remaining ones are:
SHEI/shy/šai ϣ, HORI/hoori/hori ϩ. (To simplify memorization, SAMPI/none/psis nše Ⳁ is also made available
on AltGr-p.)
“Business/Currencies/Hooks/Added Vertical Line/Not+mogrify” layout (as visible from Latin personality after AltGr-$):
Observe that all of ©®℠™℗ “Business” signs are in the obvious locations; so are Vietnamese ơ and ư (heuristic:
the $ sign has a hook on top right). All the currency signs of Unicode 6.2 can be entered by the first
letter of their name or the country name (but one may need to combine with Shift or AltGr).
Exceptions are YUAN[s],RIEL,RIAL,LIVRE TOURNOIS which are entered by the second letter. (Trivia: there are 3 signs for YEN (one latin,
and 2 ideographic), and 2 (ideographic) signs for YUAN.) The “principal” sign for both of them is available on y/Y;
the remaining 2 signs for YEN are on AltGr-y/Y, and both signs for YUAN are on AltGr-u/U.
The remaining exceptions are the common currency symbols recognized by the shape, such as $
and £.
Here is the same layout with AltGr-bindings added in red (with letters outlined in green,
and business symbols in blue):
Note that zero-vowel Latin letters (schwa) are positioned on Z. This convention (considering Z and
0 as siblings) also influences other decisions made in design of this keyboard. Trivia: Do not confuse these Latin
letters between themselves (Azeri əƏ vs. African ǝƎ), or with similarly-shaped Cyrillic letter әӘ, or with IPA symbol
ə for schwa, or with THERE EXISTS math symbol ∃. As a minimum, they sort differently, have different capitalization
rules, and their surrounding may be typeset differently by a smart enough typesetter. Similarity (or even identity) of glyphs has
very little relationship to “sameness” of Unicode characters.