I used EmacsEverywhere with ahk. It generally works great. Sometimes while an holding down ctr-f (or b) it sticks in an f (or b) instead of moving the curiosity forward (or back). I'm pretty happy with it though.

(Don't hate me. Years of Emacs usage is hard to overcome. I even made Emacs bindings for Davinci Resolve...)

There used to be a keyboard called Optimizr produced by a company called Matias: https://matias.ca/optimizer/

It hardware-mapped the CapsLock key to be a modifier for a bunch of other things, basically allowing your right hand never to have to move off the home row.

It's been discontinued but I managed to re-do a lot of the functionality in software using (a somewhat older version of) AutoHotkey: https://github.com/jasonincanada/dot-files/blob/master/optim...

There's one there for dvorak too of course

> very unresponsive

AutoHotkey seems to operate at a pretty high level in Windows' input processing stuff. There are lower-level APIs and tools available, but which behaviors are you trying to replicate?

All I really want is to have each shift bound to parentheses on tap. This was exceptionally easy to do in Mac (Karabiner) but seems halfway to impossible on Windows.

AHK has usually worked for me in the past for rebindings, but this problem in particular seems to be too much for it.

What tools have you tried? Have you tried SharpKeys? IIRC I've used it in the past - not for your scenario though - and it worked well. Plus it's on GitHub.