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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

On a tangent, why are non-qwerty keyboards so poorly designed for programming? And specifically, why is apple’s azerty layout so terrible?

Just look at this image: https://i.stack.imgur.com/3LL8a.png

Can you find the [ and ] keys? If you’re having trouble, it’s because you have to use 2 (two!) modifier keys and activate the ( or ) keys, which themselves are clumsily placed. This cannot be typed one-handed in a comfortable way. Apple’s azerty layout is unique in this, as regular azerty puts those keys in a more sensible place. I keep wondering: why does apple make me do a Vulcan nerve pinch every time I want to index an array?

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It's the other way around. The keyboard was the foundation for the programming languages and shortcuts, like moving with hjkl in vim. No German keyboard user would have created a language like C with curly braces, when you would break your fingers typing this (alt 8 is {, alt 9 is }, and alt+5 is [, alt+6 is ] ).

I use a US keyboard for that exact reason

I reassign my Caps lock key as a third level modifier. That way I can type { with Caps Lock + 7. Caps lock is so large I can comfortably use my pinky and ring finger to press and hold it, while I use my right hand to press 7, 8, 9 or 0 for {, [, ], } respectively.

I do something similar: http://blog.pythonaro.com/2020/06/better-access-to-special-c...

Aah, this explains why we have two keyboard layouts in Poland.

Original keyboards (up until 1980s) had special polish letters like ąęśćżń on dedicated keys, and various characters like [{$ moved around.

That is called „Polish” layout.

Then, since 1990 we have „Polish (programmer’s)” , which is essentially the american keyboard and local characters hidden under alt-right.

Literally everyone uses „Polish (programmers)” now, and you just need to remember to choose this, and not the regular „Polish” in system settings :)

I think the answer is that their engineers overwhelmingly use the English layout keyboards and work in Cupertino. Most improvements to coding on a Mac I have seen have a design-for-self element where apple employees are eating their own dog food and want to improve the taste.

C was famously designed in Murray Hill on a system with Teletype 37s, which featured then-fairly-novel { and } keys (as it so happens, the shifted versions of [ and ]).

‘Happens’ is understating it. ‘[’ is ASCII 0x5B and ‘{’ is ASCII 0x7B, and the Teletype 37 was entirely electromechanical. For those unfamiliar, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

QWERTY is awful for programming. I use https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/. which puts control characters on the number row. `&[{}(=*)+]` is 1 to 0.

Most keyboard-layouts predate programming-languages, because they were designed for typewrites decades before the first modern computers even existed. So there did gave much to usage of special chara back then. Additionally most languages were designed by americans, on US-layout, which had a great impact on usages of different char in our digital world. Like for example the usage of @, which AFAIK was only used for e-mail because there was no other free char on the developers keyboard available.

> Like for example the usage of @, which AFAIK was only used for e-mail because there was no other free char on the developers keyboard available.

'@' meant 'at' looong before e-mail was invented.

But traditionally mainly (only?) in the context of "at [price per unit]", not "at [location]".

In American usage, it has had widespread use as shorthand for “at” in many different contexts, not just in terms of price per unit fir quite a while; some of them.may have been catalyzed by thr usage in email, but I think enough are older that email fits into an existing pattern rather than creating a new one.

Yes, in english language. Other languages have/had different names, if they even knew it at this point. There was of course a reason why the @ was on the english keyboard-layout, but it was a very different reason from the later usage as location/user-reference. Point is, if e-mail would have been invented in a different culture, there would be a good chance that the symbol wasn't even on their keyboard at the time and a different symbol would likely have been used.

Honestly that's one of the reasons I'm happy with the Logitech Craft: it lets me use a proper Azerty layout yet silent like the Apple keyboards (plus I can control both my computers from a single keyboard, but that's more an edge case).

If only it weren’t so damn expensive...

Just get this one https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/MLA22C/A/magic-keyboar...

Why is it so bad? Because folks keep on buying it. So there's no demand to improve it.

I remapped all those keys to Tab+righthand, so to type the curly brace I press Tab+j. It's fantastic.

The neo2 layout took this into account, (), [], {} and <> are under your strongest fingers.

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