Hacker News Reader

The single biggest one-time leveling up I did as a programmer, was switching to a US keyboard. All the various symbols are just so much easier to type (except, of course, numbers should probably be shift-typed). You can still use your local keyboard for text...

View on HN

I created my own keyboard. It based on the ISO English keyboard, but when I want to type Hungarian characters I just hit the Caps Lock (or alt if I only need one character), but every other character stays in the same space. I also moved the zero before one because I needed the space for the 9 extra characters.

Coding on the Hungarian keyboard is a nightmare, I don't know how others can do it.

Same for me. I have a German physical keyboard using the US layout, but with left-alt + the keys where the normally umlauts are allowing me to type äüöÄÜÖß and additionally „“‚‘ quickly.

But I've grown up learning programming on US-layout keyboards.

> numbers should probably be shift-typed

I tried this for a week several years ago; it was not a success. Aside from all the muscle memory re-learning, I also found that I used the number more often than I had thought.

What I do these days just make Vim abbreviations; for example 1= becomes !=, ;= becomes :=, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com