Billy’s Special keyboard layout:
US Layout for coders + German letters

This keyboard layout may only be useful for people with U.S. keyboards who only occasionally need to type in German. But that’s me! And I published it here in case you find it helpful too.

As a software developer, I need all the brackets and punctuation on the US keyboard layout at my fingertips. But I live in Berlin, so I also need to type in German! Typing in German is pretty easy if you switch to the International keyboard, but then all the punctuation ends up in weird places, not to mention always getting Z and Y wrong.

This keyboard layout can do it all. It’s based on the US layout, and uses key combinations using the semicolon key ; to trigger the accented letters that I need here in Germany. I also included the Euro symbol and a few Turkish letters too because I need them, but you can ignore those if you don’t need ‘em.

How to type German umlauts and special characters

Every key on this keyboard works exactly like the regular U.S. keyboard with the exception of the semicolon (;) key which triggers a two-key combination:

For umlauts etc:

• First type ; – nothing will show up on your screen
• Then type a letter: e o u a s c x i.
• The umlauted or accented character will magically appear! € öüäß çşğı

For Capital Letters:

• First type ; – nothing will show up on your screen
• Then type the CAPITAL letter: SHIFT plus o u a s etc.
• The capital letter will magically appear: Ö Ü Ä etc.

To type a real semicolon:

• Press ; twice (“semi-semi”)
• Or press “semi-space” to get a semicolon followed by a space.

** Euro Symbol:**

• Is ; followed by e

Summary

Letter	How to Type It
;	; + ;
€	; + E
ö	; + O
ü	; + U
ä	; + A
ß	; + S
ç	; + C
ş	; + X
ğ	; + G
ı/İ	; + I

Remember, to produce a Capital Letter, press ; first and then SHIFT and the letter.

Installation

1. Windows

The provided setup file should work on Windows 10 and 11.

• Download keyboard-semicolon-de.zip
• Unzip the contents, and run setup.exe.
• After it installs, log out or reboot your system
• Then go to your system Language and Region control panel. Under the English language options, you should be able to add/remove the “United States (Semicolon DE+TR)” keyboard.
• For my own system, I removed the “US Qwerty” keyboard so that Windows always defaults to this layout. Otherwise you may need to choose it from the language icon near your system clock/tray.
• If the keyboard picker doesn’t show up in your system tray, try Windows Key + Space Bar

2. Mac

This is tested on both Intel and M1 macs.

• Download billy-en-de-tr-keyboard.dmg
• Run the .dmg file installer
• Select it using the Keyboard Control Panel

3. Linux

The files mentioned below can be found in https://github.com/billyc/keyboard/linux

1. Copy the following two files using sudo to their proper places:

   sudo cp usr-share-x11-xkb-symbols-us /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us
   sudo cp usr-share-x11-xkb-rules-evdev.xml /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml
   

2. Copy the XCompose file into your home folder as ~/.XCompose

3. From Gnome Settings, choose Regional & Language, and under Input Sources:

   • Press +
   • Choose “English (United States)”
   • Select “English (Billy-En/De/Tr)”
   • Click Add and close.

You may need to logout/login to select your new keyboard from the top-right system bar.

Make Your Own Layout

Feel free to fork and make your own keyboards!

Windows: Built with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.
Props to keyboards.jargon-file.org for the initial KLC file!

Linux: I followed this blog to figure out how to do it:
http://karols.github.io/blog/2013/11/18/creating-custom-keyboard-layouts-for-linux/