After having read this post's title, you might have though “ah, he'll be presenting [insert favourite subculture keyboard layout eg neo]! nice!”. If so, you'd be wrong. If, on the other hand, you're thinking “perfect keyboard layout? There's no such thing!”, then I couldn't agree more. Anyway, …
I have been using the standard US keyboard layout for years, almost always without actually using an American keyboard. The main reason I chose it over the German layout is that characters like []{}\|/`, used in many programming languages, are placed in a civilized manner, meaning I can type them quickly and without breaking my fingers.
The standard US layout has a certain problem, though: when it comes to typing in languages that don't happen to be English, it fails spectacularly. Since I have to write quite a lot of German and, nowadays, French, on my computer(s), this is quite a drawback.
Umn, I fixed it
It's not that hard to create your own keyboard layout, which I have done. I chose to use a standard US layout as base, leaving every single key binding intact, using level-3, i.e. AltGr, bindings to represent missing characters.
The German umlauts and ligature ÄäÖöÜüßẞ (the last character is the capital ß) I decided to map to the most obvious places imaginable: on the A, O, U and S keys, so AltGr+Shift+U produces Ü.
I created support for most romance languages by adding Çç to the C key (as above), Ññ to the N key, and a number of hidden dead keys: AltGr+' e renders é, AltGr+" e renders ë; the keys for `,~ and ^ act equivalently. The characters Ææ,Œœ,Øø and Åå are on the W,I,Q and Z keys, respectively, ensuring full support for French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and probably other languages. The Esperanto alphabet is completed by the dead circumflex ˆ and AltGr+y, rendering ŭ. The Dutch IJ and ij are on the J key. Some other possibly useful characters, beside the quotes „ « » ‹ › “ ” (on the [] and <> keys), are ¿ ¡ € £ ‰ ¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰ ≠ ± Ππ Μμ Δδ Ττ ° § ¦ – —. If you're really interested in the details of the layout, please, try it out!
Yes, you can have it
For X11 (Linux and other Unices): github (tarball)
For Microsoft Windows: us_tj2c.zip. (older version, missing a number of characters. German, French, and Spanish are supported equally.)