Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in both Germany and France as a programmer, I just gave in, and am using an English International layout everywhere. The mental load from switching between QWERTZ, QWERTY and AZERTY (which also messes with the M key) was just too high.

There is probably some good historic explanation for why the shared characters on these keyboard layouts have been rearranged, but in practice it's so infuriating.

Although I can create every character from these three languages from an English International keyboard, of course the preinstalled international layouts on macOS, Windows and Linux differ. And if using the layout on an English/US keyboard, likely the physical key layout (~, \, Enter) is different, too.

AZERTY amélioré sure is an improvement for the French keyboard by itself, but I'd dream of a world where we have a common compose-key keyboard for all latin-alphabet based languages.

I use the US layout as well, and the compose key works very well for me. I don't type often in languages necessitating it, but when I do, it's not much of a bother. Do people who type languages with diacritics really like those localized keyboards? Personally I have to type in a handful of languages everyday (thanks to the internet I've always done so), so I wouldn't like a layout tailored to a single language. The compose key is really a godsend.

I'd say that >90% of keyboard users never think about "liking" their keyboard localization at all; if you grow up in a country with a particular standardized keyboard, it's just the one you're used to, and you deal with its quirks. On top of that, I'd guess that >50% of keyboard users still need to frequently look at the keys when they're typing, so changing keyboard layouts to one that their keyboard isn't marked up for isn't a realistic option.

For me personally, I also type in 3 different languages (two of them making use of various diacritics) frequently; my preference for the last decade or so has been to use the "normal" US-English layout for writing English prose, code, or working on the command line, and switching to US-International (w/dead keys) whenever I'm writing in a non-English language. I just find the dead keys on backticks and quotes to be especially annoying for programming.

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