Dvorak for Latin Americans

One of my goals this year is to learn to type in Dvorak, to check if they are certain they have the wonders of that layout. Increased typing rate, better ergonomics, fewer errors? Count me in! ¹

Specifically, I intend to use the Spanish variant, which is similar to the English one, except that the R and H keys are swapped. However, there is a small detail regarding Spanish keyboard layouts.

For some strange reason, QWERTY layouts for Spanish are available in two variants: Spanish and Latin American Spanish.² Their differences lie in the location of the symbols and the presence (or absence) of some of them. One of the simplest changes you may notice is the position of the at sign (@): in Spanish is is located on the key with the number 2, while the Latin American layout has it on the key for the letter Q.

To my surprise, Ubuntu (or rather, X.Org) only has a Dvorak layout for Spanish. As the keyboard of my notebook has a Latin American layout, and I don’t intend to memorize the position of each symbol, I decided to do some research and create (with some help) a Dvorak variant for Latin American Spanish, which I uploaded to this repository on Github.

So, if you use a Spanish keyboard, you’re a fan of Dvorak, but not of the cedilla (ç) or the euro symbol (€), and you hate to see a grave accent (`) when you want to type an acute one (´), check it out.