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Comment by sacado2 | Hacker News Reader

Even if your code is written in English, some text still has to be written in your own language (in particular, anything the end user will happen to read). And, although you can write English from a (say) French keyboard, writing French from an English keyboard is a PITA.

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> writing French from an English keyboard is a PITA.

There's no English keyboard.

Writing French with the US international layout is actually pretty easy.

There are US English and English UK keyboards, both a very similar, and very dissimilar from French and German keyboards. I would challenge you to tell me how you type the following letters "easily" on an US international keyboard: ä ö ü ß.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards...

The umlaut is a dead key so it's very easy. ß is AltGr or Option + S which I admit is a bit more annoying, but your spellchecker should take care of that, no? (I'm Swiss so even when I have to type in broken German, we don't use the ß here).

All layouts are tradeoffs. Not using the US layout makes a lot of things annoying in our field. I write code and use my IDE's keyboard shortcuts more than I need to write long texts in my native language.

There are many diacritics in French, and not having a key for the most frequent accentuated letters is far from optimal (for instance, the previous sentence in French would contain 5 diacritics).

You'll never find an optimal layout, they're all compromises.

I've switched to US intl 15 years ago and I don't type in French any slower than I used to. On the other hand I benefit greatly from using the default layout in our very US-centric field.

If I set my layout to US then @ and " swap.

So " is Shift+' and @ is shift+2

In UK keyboard layout, @ is shift+', and " is shift+2 (which is what is shown on my keyboard keys).

Can you imagine how Russians and Bulgarians deal with it? Yes, they switch layouts all the time. Write some lines of code in English, switch to Russian or Bulgarian to write comments or reply in Slack.

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