The following document details the troubles I'm experiencing with my new keyboard.
This keyboard is, as mentioned on the index, a Kinesis Advantage360.
The keyboard is an ergonomic split keyboard, and has a fairly minimal set of keys. This includes the Alt Gr key, which is responsible for producing the @ character on a Norwegian keyboard layout. It is also outright missing keys I have previously relied upon.
For characters that require an Alt Gr keypress, you may use Alt and Ctrl in conjunction for the same effect. The trouble, unfortunately comes when you use the Windows terminal. In the terminal, Ctrl is rebound and therefore you cannot use the combination of keys to get the characters you want. This is an issue for me because I develop directly on my server via SSH, using a terminal text editor (neovim, btw!)
Given my predicament, I am faced with a range of solutions to consider.
The first option to consider is switching to an English layout. On this layout, keys that are commonly used for programming are a little more accessible. However, this comes with the disappearance of Norwegian characters (of which there are three) and, of course, there is a learning curve to use the layout efficiently.
The keyboard comes with a decent configuration software, so another option would be to rebind certain unused or infrequently used keys to characters that I use during my development. This will require quite a bit of testing, and I need to be careful as to not rebind keys I wind up using.
An interesting and new option to explore is creating a separate layer for development. This keyboard has a good system for layering, which allows you to switch between keyboard layers with a single keypress. This means that you could bind any characters you would like on the "development" layer, without disrupting the base layer. Issues here might be sparks of confusion between layers, causing incorrect character inputs.
There is no true conclusion, yet. However, this entry will be updated over time as I give the different solutions a shot. All solutions are interesting, so we'll see which one I land on. When I land on a specific solution, I will let you know my reasoning!