I wish vim was a little bit more "international" because some commands that involves {,^,[ combined with ctrl are tricky to trigger on non-us keymaps and don't feel as natural as `yy`. Some obvious keys that only need 1 keystroke for an US user requires a combination of alt-gr or something for french users. Soon I'll be remapping my keyboard for coding but I also need those é,à,ç,è :)
For a time, I was working on gathering some good data on keyboard layouts. I wanted to work out which keys were commonly available, which weren't, and so on. I wanted to work out which characters were the most "i18n-friendly" for developers worldwide.
One day, I happened to take a programming class in Brazil. I noticed that a lot of students were simply switching their keyboard layout to US English in order to write code. I ditched that project.
Still a bit weird if you type on keys that actually mean something else. Especially german keyboards are not designed to code with (for instance \ required three key strokes on a Mac keyboard, [ and ] are also pretty hard to reach...)
After a year of coding on a German kezboard (sic) set to US eng I finally bought little stickers and relabeled the []{}<>#_| keys. So much better not to have the cognitive friction anymore.
This, and learning to touch type helped a lot. And on top of that all kind of shortcuts different programs use become more logic, such as the [-key for changing the brush size in Photoshop, cmd+[ for indenting in textmate...
Besides mapping these keys to other keys you rarely use, such as the capslock, you can also change your keyboard layout on the fly. I use Cmd+Space to switch layouts.
I have switched to US-International with AltGr dead keys. Took me 3 weeks to adapt to the new layout - but man what an investment! I had learned before this German and French layouts - it was a loss of time if I look back now. On Linux you have this layout almost on all distributions, on Windows you have to install it separately. Concerning the accents: with the US-International you have all the French accents + a lot of more - I can now write French, German and Turkish with a single keyboard, without changing the layout! And it is possible even to write capital letters with accents: ÇÉÈÂ. If you need to sometimes work with the keyboards from other people - at least the US layout is ALWAYS installed (in Windows most of the time you can switch to it with Alt+LeftShift). The downside is that there are not many Laptop vendors that allow you to chose the US-International layout, this is one more argument for me to stick with ThinkPads.
From the accents that you posted it looks like you use AZERTY layout. Do the switch to US-International and you will not regret. The AZERTY is awful for developers (and even for normal writers).
It is totally legitimate to remap keys so that they are comfortable for you, that is why everything is customizable, don't let anyone tell you that there is only one way you have to use vim
I already re-binded many things but I think changing the keymap might be easier in the long-term because I don't have to support my modifications and keep them up-to-date when I add more functions or when I discover more vim bindings.
