I've used a number of Hebrew and Yiddish keyboard layouts in the past and have found all of them lacking in some respect. In the end, I created my own custom keyboard layout that works best for me when I'm typing Hebrew or Yiddish. This document provides a summary of the layout and some of my design rationales.
In order to use this keyboard layout, you can:
The following Hebrew keyboard layouts are in common use and I have tried and dismissed them:
In order to address the shortcomings (IMHO) of the above layouts, I created my own Hebrew Keyboard layout that attempts to better address the requirements I listed. Here is the layout:
The unshifted keyboard is fairly similar to the unshifted Hebrew-QWERTY layout. However, the tet is on the "v" character instead of the "y" character and all punctuation marks and special characters are the same as on a regular US keyboard. I can type very quickly in MIH (without vowels) using this layout.
All characters with final forms (e.g. kaf, pe, tsadi, mem, nun) are on the shifted version of the character. Shin(dot) and sin(dot) are on the shifted shin and samekh characters. The vav and yod variants are on the shifted vav and yod keys. Some special characters are also in the shifted key map; however, all shifted English punctuation marks and special characters are in the same positions as on the English keyboard layout.
As I mentioned earlier, I found the Tiro layout for cantillation marks and accents to be positioned in a logical manner. The Tiro layout positions are:
My Alt (Option) key map contains all of the same characters that are found on the Shifted Tiro keyboard layout in basically the same mapping. The difference is that the vowels are positioned on the "asdfghjkl;'" row in a more logical manner, grouped (as much as possible) by English phonetic sound and with the more commonly used vowels directly on the "asdfghjkl;'" keys (making it easier for a touch typist to enter them).
The Alt-Shift key map contains some less commonly used character modifications. The placement is an attempt to retain consistency so that (even though the characters are not used very often) it is still relatively easy to remember where the characters are. E.g.:
I made use of the following material to help me determine relative character frequencies (although not the prime consideration when determining key placement, these statistics were useful):
Hebrew Vowel Frequency in BHS (http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2844.pdf).
Hebrew Character Frequency (http://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-hebrew).