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Comment by cl3misch | Hacker News Reader

I find the best layout for English and German to be "German (US)". It has been such a revelation. I enjoy the comforts of accessible braces while the occasional umlaut (or greek letter) is only an AltGr away.

I imagine there might be people who don't code but write a lot of German texts. They might need umlauts far more often than braces and the native "German" layout might be more sensible. Otherwise, I despise the German layout.

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I have been using EURKey for a few years now. You might like it. https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu

Thanks! It does indeed look better than the prevalent "US intl", which places Ö on the P key in favor of accented O.

I think, because I only ever need umlauts, I still prefer "German (US)" which only adds umlauts to the US layout.

Yeah, I love EURKey, it even includes the capital ẞ. The only thing I’d like is an easier typographic apostrophe (’ instead of ') which is on Ctrl+Alt+Shift+0 (though I do use it almost automatically, nowadays).

Nice project. However it makes writing in some languages merely possible but not easy. For example Portuguese uses a lot of ã and õ, which are only available via dead keys. If I have to use dead keys anyway, then I'd rather use a Compose key, aptly mapped on the otherwise-useless Insert key.

Besides, Romanian language is not fully supported, lacking ț and ă, and Polish too, lacking ą and ę.

The problem with eurkey is the high enter key on German keyboards, it's kinda made for US keyboards. (I usually map caps-aous to äöüß and that's good enough for me).

My problem is a proper layout on a German keyboard, not some weird Umlauts on a US one :P

I also find the best layout for French is the US one with Mac-style modifiers. Alt E + E -> É, etc. Direct access to braces and numbers, which is great for programming. And it also doesn't break the ' and ` keys, which US international breaks on Windows, since you have to type them twice to get the regular character.

As others have said, I'm not a professional typist having to follow along in a court of law or whatever. I don't remember ever being limited in my work by my typing speed. So not having to learn weird layouts and adapt when I change computers or in non-ideal situations (think BIOS passwords and the like), deal with weird shortcut placements, etc is much more of a win than pumping out more words per minute.

> And it also doesn't break the ' and ` keys, which US international breaks on Windows, since you have to type them twice to get the regular character.

You can also hit the space key after those characters (or other modifiers like " or ~) to get just the character and without a space after. I find it a lot easier than the Mac-approach, but YMMV.

In practice, I type those characters on their own much more often than I type them for French characters, so having to press more keys for the French ones makes more sense than the other way around.

There's also the fact that I have to type those characters in places where I don't have fancy entry systems (drive unlock passwords, rescue environments), while I don't type French in those places, so it also makes more sense for muscle memory.

Ah yeah, I generally just switch between US and US-Intl when I need to move to French. Since you can do it with Win+Space, it's pretty convenient, though I do sometimes trigger it on accident.

I don't use windows often enough to have gotten the hang of how it handles layout switching. I think, by default, it's supposed to handle them "per app". Which, in my case, sounds great: I need French for Outlook / Teams, and English everywhere else. Somehow I always seemed to type expecting the wrong layout. So I've looked for a way to have a single one which works everywhere.

Windows doesn't natively support the Mac behavior. I had to find some layout that almost does it, with the caveat that it uses alt-gr instead of mac's alt, which isn't exactly the same nor in the same spot. So I had to pile another utility on top that modifies the WIN/Menu keys to send alt-gr. Luckily, it was also able to move win to caps. So now, aside from the "weird" altgr, I'm happy enough with my keyboard under windows.

What does this refer to? Is it available for example in Windows?

I am using it on Linux (GNOME 44 under Fedora 38), where it is natively supported. I don't know about Windows specifically but I was under the impression that it is pretty well-known.

Doesnt exist on MacOS, so ill just try Eurkey layout now instead.

But anyway thanks for the tip, i never thought about just remapping the umlauts to the US layout, i am always switching between US/german until now.

This seems like a game changer, since the german layout is a huge pain to begin with, and the only thing i need from it anyway is umlauts and ß.

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