Keyboard Layouts
I have experimented with my own personalized keyboard layouts in DVORAK modified for French accents and COLMAK, as well as simply French, but optimized for programming, and QWERTY (US) optimized for French. I just didn't feel confident changing keyboard layouts when changing languages, but that would have been so much easier.
The tool I ended up using is "Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4" which is universal enough. I went with the DVORAK US layout and used ALT-GR for the keys I needed to change.
I am pretty sure I documented this somewhere and would like to find that documentation before continuing this article.
The source and work files are on my PC under box/cyber/keyboards
.