I use colemak for most of my daily writing and coding adventures, and of course this has brought an issue to light for me in terms of keyboard accessibility.
Most peoples second row is ASDFG, while mine is ARSTD. So my right is backwards, and what would normally be the G key, is now my move right by default. This causes some weird head things, but luckily I can switch these layouts on the fly with a ctrl+space. Of course sometimes my character moves differently than what I’d expect and that causes issues because I can’t always tell which keyboard layout I’m using in game. If there is some place to type in the game, which is surprisingly more common than you might think, I have to switch layouts throughout the game pretty often. I use colemak because it allows me to program for longer periods of time without any wear on my hands. I recommend learning it to anyone that suffers from joint pain after long typing spells.
This is a simple fix for me, but for a lot of gamers, they also don’t use the standard QWERTY keyboard layout. Many people may need to use DVORAK, or even some international keyboards that have a similar key layout, but different key mappings. I normally just suffered through the idea of having to switch my keyboard layouts for movements and then switch back and forth for when I want to type until I came across a game called “Mindustry.”
This game actually remaps the keys to my layout, which allows me to control things using my default layout and also if necessary, type things when necessary.
I know this may seem like a tangent, but I’ll bring this back. What would be a good way to allow better automatic key mapping for keyboard layouts of inputs, and what are the best practices for implementing such a keyboard?