This project takes the phonetic Russian keyboard layouts from Ubuntu and OSX, and makes them available on Windows. They have been tested on Windows 10, but should presumably work on Windows 7 as well.
A phonetic Russian keyboard is useful for people who are new to typing in Russian, don't have a keyboard with Russian characters on it, or (like myself) never bothered to learn the proper Russian keyboard layout.
The phonetic Russian keyboard layout that comes with Windows 10, called Russian Mnemonic, isn't great. Instead of mapping each key to one letter, it has you type combinations of keys to produce one Russian letter. For example ё is y-o, я is y-a, but ы is y followed by anything other than o or a. As you can imagine, typing ыo is... inconvenient. The same goes for several other letters.
The phonetic Russian keyboards in Ubuntu and OSX are much more reasonable in that they map each letter to one keyboard key.
You can download the latest keyboard layouts in the Releases section, or compile them yourself using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and the .klc files in this repository.
After installing the keyboard, reboot your computer and it should appear in the Language Settings section under Russian.
All layouts have four states - regular, holding Shift, holding Ctrl+Alt, and holding Ctrl+Alt+Shift.
Holding Ctrl+Alt allows you to use characters from the English layout that were replaced in the Russian layout. For example, in the OSX keyboard you can hold Ctrl+Alt to type - and = instead of ь and ъ. In the same vein, holding Ctrl+Alt+Shift allows you to type _ and +.
Instead of holding Ctrl+Alt, you can also get the same effect by holding the Right Alt key.
Screenshots of all the layouts are below:
OSX - Regular
OSX - Shift
OSX - Ctrl+Alt
OSX - Ctrl+Alt+Shift
Ubuntu - Regular
Ubuntu - Shift
Ubuntu - Ctrl+Alt
Ubuntu - Ctrl+Alt+Shift
