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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Mac Firefox and Mac Chrome both break a bunch of keyboard shortcuts if you use a non-US-ANSI keyboard. Safari handles alternate layouts correctly.

Just yesterday I learned that on an ISO Spanish keyboard, both of those browsers will pop up a help menu for ⌘⇧7. The logic goes: ⇧7 means / on a Spanish ISO keyboard, and ⇧/ means ? on a US-ANSI keyboard, therefore ⌘⇧7 is by the transitive property of inter-layout shift functions equivalent to ⌘?, which is the shortcut for opening the help menu.

They don't pop open the help menu if you press ⌘⇧', the actual ISO Spanish layout way to type ⌘?

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Stuff like this is the reason why I, as a non-american software engineer, use `US_en` layouts on all my machines.

I use a Japanese keyboard that pretends to be a US-ANSI on my laptop. The extra keys and narrow spacebar are super handy.

Something like http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/9150730dbd4d28...

Same. When I have to use someone else's computer without an US_en keyboard I look like an elder learning to type.

I use EurKey [0] (I think this was actually recommended to me on HN) so I have easy "AltGr" access to German characters like öüß. Sadly some tools (most notably Microsoft’s) have hardcoded shortcuts for some of those, which is really annoying.

[0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

I use the Canadian English layout on macOS for most of the time, if I need to enter accented letters, I can just hold down a normal letter (A) then select an accented one from the popup (Å). The international English layout works the same way if I remember correctly.

Mac everything breaks for me on a UK Mac when using an ISO keyboard rather than their non-standard ISO layout.

Page down only sometimes works, and Command+~ to switch same app Windows works in some apps and not others. It's a bit of a train wreck when you want to get rid of their pointless keys.

The built-in apps seem to handle it pretty well (ex. the dictionary app has ⌘Ä / ⌘Ö shortcuts when set to Swedish). 3rd party apps often don't care and it gets worse the more you move away from plain QWERTY.

Although macOS is good in the aspect that combinations akin to AltGr on PCs aren't unique to non-US layouts. I've seen programmers assume it's safe to assign shortcuts to Ctrl-Alt (which simulates AltGr), making it impossible to enter certain characters. Not surprising, as it's not used on the US layout (just as there's no extra key next to the left Shift).

Not only Firefox. Cmd-/ is also a very common "toggle line comment" shortcut. I think it's the default on Sublime and IntelliJ, and any editor that offers a "Sublime compatible" preset (like VS code) imitate that. Of course, such a shortcut broken out-of-the-box for any keyboard layout that lacks a / key.

Yeah, Sublime copied this shortcut (like most of its features) from TextMate, and it has since spread widely.

Amusingly, TextMate's author and many early users were European programmers with US-ANSI keyboards (because the various European layouts are just too painful for writing code in ASCII-based programming languages).

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