Besides talking about ruby and other stuff on the sigint I also talked with a few guys about keyboard layouts. I struggled with the german keyboard layout for a while now. It’s very hard to access brackets ( []{} ) on it. Sadly those brackets are very important if you write code. Even more if you write in objective c. Choosing dvorak or neo would not help, both need modifiers for the brackets, too. We discussed a lot of options and the best one was to change the öäü keys back to brackets. With that solution you have the best of both worlds. You don’t need to change your writing habbit a lot and you have fast access to those keys.

Luckily Frederic already started a keyboard layout that I could use, but it didn’t go far enough. I took his file and enhanced it a little bit.

My keyboard layout for my mac now looks like a german keyboard with these keys changed:

Key	Normal	Shift	Alt	Alt+Shift
ö	[	{	ö	Ö
ä	]	}	ä	Ä
ü	\	|	ü	Ü
ß	~	?	ß	˙

If you are interested in using it, feel free to clone it from github.