Changing keyboard layout on application focus

As everybody knows the e开发者_C百科n-US Keyboard-layout is the best one for programming. So I'd like to use it in my IDEs. But since I live in a non-en-US country I need the de-CH layout for all other applications. Now I wonder if it is possible to set the layout depending to which application currently has the focus. If that is possible, can a human brain adapt to such a behaviour or is it just confusing?

cheers, AC

The operating system is Windows 7 and the IDEs are VisualStudio and Netbeans

i thought about the same question some time ago, haven't fount an easy solution and so i changed the layout of may PC (where i do mostly programming) to en-US and left my Laptop on de-DE (i'm from germany) - after almost a week i changed back my PC to de-DE because i was confused ll the time...

you should probably mention your operating system and ides. afaik there's an option to make the keyboard layout application specific – so you set it once after starting up your ide, and when you switch windows the layout is also changed.

nevertheless, have a look at ergonomic/optimized layouts (like neo ;)

There is an option in both Windows and Linux to use a US layout with additional international characters. For instance, typing an ä will be yielded by pressing RAlt+q. The good thing about this is that it's the same combination for Windows and Linux.

I think you can configure it easily with built-in Windows settings.

In "Control Panel" - "Clock, language and Region" - "Language", you can enable "Enable different input methods for each application window" (the translation is approximated because I am using Spanish OS). I think that suffices.

I created my own customized keyboard layout with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC)

I used my current keyboard as base and modified only a few keys in order not to always twist my right thumb when I want to get curling bracktes {}

It works very well in combination with a short-cut for switching the keyboard layout. You can define such shortcut in your system language settings.