The best modification that you can do to your keyboard layout is to adapt the MIT Lisp Machine keyboard layout. The changes are small but very significant, work with either QWERTY or Dvorak, and you can do them on any PC or laptop keyboard[1]:
1. Change the layout of modifier keys from Control-Windows-Alt-Spacebar-Alt-Menu-Control to Windows-Alt-Control-Spacebar-Control-Alt-Windows (bind the outermost modifier keys to Super and Hyper if you use Emacs). This will let you do keyboard chording easily with either hand and eliminate "Emacs pinky": https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/495/what-...
2. Change Caps Lock to Backspace (RUB OUT on Lisp Machine keyboards)
3. Swap parentheses () for square brackets []
[1] Not on OS X though. Apple does not provide a way to do these remappings on OS X, and breaks the keyboard internals and consequently third party tools like PCKeyboardHack/Karabiner with every OS X release. I tried early this year with Sierra and Karabiner-Elements and this did not work. Install Linux or OpenBSD.
1. Change the layout of modifier keys from Control-Windows-Alt-Spacebar-Alt-Menu-Control to Windows-Alt-Control-Spacebar-Control-Alt-Windows (bind the outermost modifier keys to Super and Hyper if you use Emacs). This will let you do keyboard chording easily with either hand and eliminate "Emacs pinky": https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/495/what-...
2. Change Caps Lock to Backspace (RUB OUT on Lisp Machine keyboards)
3. Swap parentheses () for square brackets []
[1] Not on OS X though. Apple does not provide a way to do these remappings on OS X, and breaks the keyboard internals and consequently third party tools like PCKeyboardHack/Karabiner with every OS X release. I tried early this year with Sierra and Karabiner-Elements and this did not work. Install Linux or OpenBSD.