Colemak-CA-QWERTY-Ctrl-WIN

Colemak-CA (Colemak-DH) keyboard layout for Windows, with Qwerty mappings preserved for shortcut keys when CTRL or WIN is pressed.

Keyboard layout visual from keyboard-layout-editor.com

The US ANSI Colemak (including CapsLock as backspace) keyboard layout with the Curl & Angle Mods(known as ANSI Colemak-DH or Colemak-CA), but preserving Qwerty's mapping when either Ctrl or Win are held down, meaning most Windows shortcuts won't have to be relearned. This helps me transistion to using an Qwerty alternative while still have a Qwerty keyboard.

Made with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), using @bradfeehan's technique

How to by @bradfeehan (Copy-Pasted)

How?

The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator allows you to use an existing keyboard layout as a starting point for your own custom layout. However, instead of the obvious choice of starting with a Dvorak layout and setting a different value for each key in the Ctrl shift state (which didn't work), I started with a QWERTY layout and changed all the key scan codes, using the following procedure:

1. Start with any key, e.g. the bottom-left of the keyboard (which is Z on QWERTY)
2. Find what key is in the corresponding physical location on the Dvorak layout (semi-colon, for this key)
3. Find where that key is on a QWERTY keyboard (to the left of the Enter key)
4. Grab the key-code of that key, 28 in this case (having another untouched instance of MKLC open is useful for this)
5. Change the scan code of the original key (bottom-left key on the keyboard) to this scan code (from 2c to 28)
6. Repeat this process for all keys -- you can skip those that are the same on both layouts (A, M, the numbers, \ and `)
7. Validate the layout, (Project > Validate Layout) making sure there's no duplicate scan codes or other errors/warnings
8. Export the DLL and setup package, then install it

I needed to restart after these steps, for it to finally work, but YMMV.

Some things I'll like to see or am thinking about

1. An AHK, Linux & Mac version
2. Adding ALT to the Qwerrty mapping (This is not simple, but someone with a good understaning of C might be able to hack MSKLC by modifing it's kbd.h file)

Suggested pairing's
3. A way of either Shiftlocking or my included AHK script that makes Shift + (CapsLock as backspace) toggle Capitalization
4. A utility that shows a toast notifiacation when Capslock or Numlock state is toggled

If you want to uninstall it, just search the windows start menu for "add or remove programs", this will be listed.

Common Qwerty Shortcut keys preserved

CTRL Z(undo), CTRL Y(redo),CRTL C(Copy),CTRL V(Paste),CTRL S(Save),CTRL Q(Quit) CTRL ShIFT T(Opens a new Tab),CTRL N(New), CTRL R(relaod) CRTL P(Print) More I missed....

Credits & links

https://github.com/AWosaibi/Colemak-QWERTY-Ctrl

https://new.reddit.com/r/Colemak/comments/q8spw0/csgos_intro_to_colemak_mods

http://colemakmods.github.io/mod-dh/