Short version:

Internationalization and the goal to create the most typographically accurate, international, multilingual, American-British-European “hybrid” keyboard layout ever.

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Long version:
Hi! My name is Lenneurt, an enthusiast in languages, keyboards, typography, linguistics, and Unicode. I’ve been tinkering with custom keyboard layouts, learning about writing and typography, and bits of French here and there way back since 2015.

Then in 2016 I started my French studies at the Alliance Française which eventually led me to develop a strange interest in linguistics… and keyboard layout designs. I found out that typing non-English words was way harder than it should be, as they tend to force you to learn a completely different keyboard layout you are unfamiliar with.

I wanted to type French, but I still wanted to stick to the US QWERTY layout because I type English much more frequently (and I was unwilling to give up my number row). The deeper I delved into this subject the more complicated it becomes. There are simply too much symbols that when you need to type them outside of a word processing program like Microsoft Word, you have to learn weird shortcuts it’s usually better to not type them at all or replace them with something else. And the degree symbol ° is nowhere to be found!

It is even worse if you are thinking of typing accented letters on an English keyboard. The commonly given solution is to use unintuitive Alt codes — which do not work well or at all on my 13.3″ laptop without a dedicated number pad! A slightly better way is to open Character Map in Windows and hunt around for the symbol you need.​ Or define shortcuts in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste the symbol. Or resort to Google search. Or, even better, use the new Windows 10 symbols and emoji panel by pressing Win ⊞ + full stop (.)