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Comment by burgessaccount | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting to me is that when adapting the keyboard to other languages, they often didn't attempt to change the layout for the keys used most in those languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#International_variants I guess this makes sense in terms of international standardization, but it also to me seems to be a good argument for "no one thought this through very hard before adapting it."

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On a german keyboard Z and Y are switched, and all the punctuation character are all wrong. So much better to program with a US keyboard than a german one!

Haha, that does sound deeply annoying. But makes sense given German words. I really don't know which is better, to standardize or personalize...

It's kinda like adjusting the seat position in a car. If you could have each individual user's preferences saved somewhere and applied to every car/computer when you sit down to use it, then personalization wins.

Similarly some punctuation is moved on a Spanish keyboard, but often in Venezuela and Chile I ended up using an American keyboard with Spanish layout so I had to just know which keys were which because the letters printed on them were wrong. Fortunately at that time I was not doing a lot of programming because it was annoying.

Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants. The typewriter one is a direct translation from the layout used on typewriters, which usually is well thought out. The phonetic one just assigns keys to their phonetic latin equivalents or when there's no equivalent, to a letter that kind of looks like it, or is just free. Since cyrillic has more letters than latin, you lose the `, [, and ] keys (at least in Bulgarian phonetic). All keyboards sold here have two letters on each key - one for the US layout and one for the typewriter layout. And still the majority of people prefer to just use the phonetic layout simply because it works with their existing muscle memory. For a while the most popular Windows 95 and XP program was FlexType - it let you type cyrillic letters using the phonetic layout back when Windows only had the typewriter layout available.

> Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants.

No, only Bulgaria uses the (insane, IMO) 'phonetic cyrillic qwerty' keyboard layout.

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