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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Did you not read the article? Keyboards can be very different depending on your region and language. The author shows a picture of an AZERTY keyboard. Even ISO layouts can vary per country/language. That's why macOS asks you to hit the keys to the left/right of the shift keys in an attempt to lookup your keyboard layout.

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Actually, the keyboards are not different. The keytop engravings differ, but that's it.

There are really only a few actual physical differences amongst Model M/Windows and workalike keyboards. (i.e. I am not talking about things like Maltron keyboards.) Those are the differences between 101/104, 102/105, 103/106, 104/107, and 106/109 key keyboards.

Ironically, that's really all that looking at the keys next to the shift keys gives one. The 102/105-key and 104/107-key keyboards add a key at B00, in between the left shift and B01. The 104/107-key and 106/109-key keyboards add a key at B11, in between the right shift and B10. So it's possible to detect the number of keys somewhat by seeing what USB HID codes come down the wire for "next to the shift key".

But this does not tell the computer anything about what is engraved on the keytops, and is not sufficient information for determining, say, Dvorak from AZERTY. (It's not even sufficient for detecting the 103/106-key keyboard, whose extra keys are on row A.)

Since practically all keyboards are USB these days, one wonders why there isn't a standard to have the keyboard just report its layout and language and whatnot to the OS.

Because the keyboard electronics is the same, the difference is what's printed on the plastic keycaps.

Exactly. This is standard PC behavior (even older than IBM PC) for all keys other than a-z.

Control/shortcut keys are bound to the physical key, not to the regional layout characters bound to them. The displayed shortcut is often shown as the one for the US/UK layout.

As someone that often switches from US layout for programming to local layout for a few national characters, I'd consider any other behavior to be incorrect.

(People using QWERTZ/AZERTY might not agree/don't switch layouts that much. I'd be really annoyed if location for Ctrl+Z moved around... This is why standard key for Undo on PC was Alt+Backspace, which I still often use).

> Control/shortcut keys are bound to the physical key, not to the regional layout characters bound to them.

There's no reason that would have to change. If the OS was aware of both the key's physical location and what character it was supposed to represent it could easily keep the same physical mapping while simultaneously displaying the correct characters for that mapping.

So? Monitor electronics (the panel) are the same, but the EDID chip in a monitor still describes not only things about the panel, but about the monitor itself, like its orientation or factory color-calibration, and in fact the make and model of the monitor. Why not have such a chip in other peripherals? They're not expensive. Many keyboards already have flash for firmware updates or remembering F13-F24 binds.

That is not an analogous situation. Keyboard layouts are entirely a software thing. Modern keyboards have zero knowledge of keyboard layouts. Their communications protocol does not deal in keyboard layouts. They effectively speak entirely in terms of ISO 9995-1 key positions and a big bitmap.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21915931

Entirely a software thing? Seems like ISO 9995 and its extensions don't specify anything about the top row of the keyboard (Escape, F1-F24, PrintScreen/ScrollLock/Pause, etc.)

I know that "media keys" (e.g. a Calculator button) aren't actually keys but another kind of USB HID device hanging out on the keyboard like a Touchpoint mouse; but F1-F12 keys really are keys, events sent from the same device that sends regular keysyms. Are they just random non-positional codes hiding out outside the ISO 9995 reserved range?

Yes, entirely. Function keys are not different to the others, and constitute row K. Nor are "media" keys, which are just more keys. Apart from one key, [Fn], they are all just bits in a giant bitmap, indexed by USB HID usage and (usually but not necessarily) partly encoded as an inverted array, on the wire. The keyboard layouts, in software on the host, define the meanings for all of them.

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