I use a Czech keyboard layout on my Mac, because Czech has some letters that don't exist on a US keyboard, and I don't like switching between layouts. So basically all "programming" characters (braces, brackets, parentheses, apostrophes, quotation marks, pipes, colons) are behind modifiers.

I would totally enjoy being able to tell my IDE to "call foo with bar and string hello there end string with a block of gee times two" or something, instead of:

  foo(:bar, "Hello there") { |gee| gee * 2 }

Just that, not having to think about typing different symbols would be a serious quality of life feature for me.

My solution is just not to use czech characters, seems to work well so far :D

>So basically all "programming" characters (braces, brackets, parentheses, apostrophes, quotation marks, pipes, colons) are behind modifiers.

Poland ditched a similar QWERTZ-based layout in favour of this: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Polish_programmer%27s_lay...

It's basically the standard US layout but the right alt (AltGr) is a modifier. So, for example, AltGr+A gives "ą".

I don't see why something similar can't be done for the Czech alphabet.

> I don't see why something similar can't be done for the Czech alphabet.

It probably could — we already can't fit all the letters with diacritics on the number row, so "ď, ť, ň, ó" are key combos. But as far as I know, Czech uses diacritics a bit more than Polish (e.g. for sounds that are digraphs in Polish), consider:

"Že se nestydÍŠ, nutit lidi psÁt ČeskÉ speciÁlnÍ znaky pomocÍ dvojhmatŮ!" — that's 10 modifiers just for the diacritics.

Having ALL diacritics as modifier combos would make typing actual texts even more annoying than programming is now.

Have you tried the UCW layout? English-like keyboard, but with a bonus modifier key that produces Czech (and other) letters. I use it and it's so much better than the traditional Czech layout.

If voice dictation was a killer feature, everybody would use it all the time for ordinary texts. But for some reason only few (lawyers? doctors?) use it.

I believe that's mostly because it doesn't work reliably. Doctors, lawyers, architects etc have a somewhat limited professional vocabulary and often say the same things, so voice recognition works pretty well for them. But when you write a random message, you have a much broader range of topics, and dictation that fails quickly makes the whole thing change from an improvement to an ordeal. "No, not 'or deal'. delete word. delete word. delete word. O-R-D-E-A-L. Yes, that's it. No, don't write that, sigh".