Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Last time I needed a new laptop (my old one died) I took a 8 hour train to travel to the Netherlands from Munich instead of back home to Berlin (where I live) just so I could visit a store that has laptops with a non German layout (US international). The only way to get a non German keyboard in Germany is to order them online and wait for a week+ (typically) for that to ship internationally (because they don't stock these locally). That was clearly unacceptable. So, 8 hour train ride it was because I needed a replacement in a hurry and I got to visit my parents. Win win.

The alternative would have been buying a laptop with literally every key I care about in the wrong place in some local store. It's great that alternate keyboard layouts are available to those that actually need/want them but it really sucks that you get locked into these choices just because of where you are. Local shop owners don't seem to have any commercial sense whatsoever. Here's a genius idea in a city full of expats (Berlin, Munich), you know, maybe stock a few laptops with international keyboards. Even the local Apple store doesn't do that. And any time you go there, a very meaningful percentage of the customers is clearly not German.

Every non German buying a German keyboard because they have to is basically an unhappy customer. I know loads of foreigners here moaning about German keyboards. I've never met a non German that actually prefers having keys in the wrong place. That's not a thing; it's bloody annoying. It's equally annoying in other countries where expats live. E.g. French keyboard layouts are worse, AZERTY instead of QWERTY. At least in Germany you get QWERTZ (Y and Z are swapped). I've actually met quite a few German programmers that remap their keyboards so they can program without having to use four fingers to produce a single key-press.

I moved to Iceland a year ago, and brought my PC and my laptop with me. I am confounded by icelandic (nordic in general) keyboards. I can understand their use for a non-technical person, but even keys such as @ are obscured behind "Alt Gr" which is a secondary right side only alt-key? And the position of braces, brackets, and parantheses is also clearly an afterthought. Obviously, years of muscle memory are hard to replace, so I've continued to use my US keyboards.

But there's a problem. I want to spell people and places' names correctly, and on my PC that means I have to swap input locales often in order to type proper icelandic characters like ð, ö, þ, æ, í etc. This is annoyingly hard on a keyboard that doesn't support them natively! I will give apple some credit here - it's incredibly easy and intuitive to type foreign characters on a US keyboard just by holding down 'i' for example, if you only occasionally need to use them. Windows requires you to either learn the old-school way of holding alt, and typing the ascii code on the number pad, or hot-swap input languages. I know German uses far fewer unique characters, but how do you cope with that problem when you need German characters like.. sharp S, oumlaut, etc?

I am a non German, but I spent more time using German layout than the US one. The killer feature of German keyboard: it is so natural for vim (and IDEs with vim emulation)

- the registers "+, "*, "~ are on the same key

- `,` and `;` for backward and forward searching are on the same key

- the macro operations `q` and `@` are also on the same key

- `^` for the line beginning is the key left to `1`, which also makes sense for `Ctrl+^` to switch recent buffers.

I would guess that the amount of people who care about which keyboard layout they use, don't use the local keyboard layout, and require appropriate labeling of keys (i.e. don't touch type) at the same time isn't that high. I can imagine how annoying it must be to be in that group, though.

There are few million people in Berlin. A couple of hundred of thousand of them are Turkish or Russian minorities. And another few hundred thousand expats are working in the tech industry from all over the world. Most coffee shops in my area don't even have German speaking staff; much to the annoyance of some of the locals.

Some, of those people buy locally and suffer the bad experience of dealing with a sub optimal keyboard. But a lot of them take their money abroad. Local businesses are missing out on that, which IMHO is kind of stupid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com