I use Ctrl+Alt as a substitute for Alt Gr making it feel as natural as typing any other shift-bound special character on the right side of keyboard
It's standard on windows but I have to resort to a hacky solution to make it work on linux unfortunately (still don't have a nice way of doing it cleanly so suggestions are welcome, currently it's an autokey script where e.g. ctrl+alt+0 prints '}', which isn't elegant, doesn't work in wayland etc)
I use autokey not as a hotkey but as text expansion. If I type "..c" then this is expanded into "{}" with the cursor inside the braces. And to surround text with "{}" I use ",,c", hence "whatever,,c" becomes "{whatever}". I have similar text expansion for other symbols that require AltGr, square braces are ..s and ,,s for instance. On Windows Autohotkey can do the same, just the scripting language is different. The Autokey text for curly braces is simply "{}" and for surrounding with curly braces the script is: import time keyboard.send_keys("++") time.sleep(0.25) sample = clipboard.get_selection() keyboard.send_key("") keyboard.send_keys("{%s}" % sample) Maybe it helps you.