Using the Neo layout on a laptop
For a while I had been interested in alternative keyboard layouts and while Dvorak seemed interesting, the Neo layout looked like an even nicer one, having been designed from the ground up for speed and ergonomics, specifically for German.
Now, it is trivial to pop the keys out of a regular keyboard and rearrange them according to the desired layout but that just isn't possible with 99% of the laptops on the market. Since I wasn't willing to learn the new layout "blind" the only solution seemed to be stickers. I had previously used pre-printed transparent stickers on another laptop to get a German layout for the umlauts since it was a British keyboard and (apart from being quite expensive) that started to look dirty and dismantle around the edges rather quickly.
This time I got 1/4" Chartpak vinyl lettering. At first I wasn't sure if they'd stay put or easily loosen after use but after some use that doesn't seem to be the case at all. I also wondered if the tactile differences through the many little edges around the letters would get annoying and even though it's a bit weird at first that the keys aren't smooth, I hardly notice after a while. Lastly, the size was really perfect, except in the case of the W I could place the letters in the lower right hand corner and still have the qwerty arrangement visible (but not too visible, the new ones clearly stand out).
Flipping the layout on the machine was very easy. One can use either KDE's own keyboard switcher or simply change the variant in xorg.conf. Neo is provided by default on Gentoo, of course.
Some will probably see this as a heresy committed on Apple's design, but hey, it's removable and my casing has a little bit of the discoloring the first batch of Macbooks had anyway.
Obligatory screenshot:
So, it works great for me, looks better than previous attempts and cost me next to nothing. Now I only have to practice some more to get my speed above my qwerty levels...
