EurKEY: The European Keyboard Layout – For Europeans, Coders and Translators | Hacker News Reader

EurKEY: The European Keyboard Layout – For Europeans, Coders and Translators

eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu

71 pointsthunderbong138 comments

Having moved around Europe, I stick to US international. As a programmer, all these weird keyboard layouts that put their locally preferred characters in places where a US keyboard layout has all the things that programmers use all the time, is just really inconvenient. I've met more than a few Germans, Finns, and Swedish that map their local keyboards to US English for this reason. Keeping the local layout is just begging for repetitive strain injuries. Having to use 3 fingers to produce a { or a [ is just not acceptable or workable. And mostly the working language in a lot of companies is English anyway.

Reallz well said ;)

Developer from Norway here and I've used 'US Intl, with dead keys' for about 10+ years.

Our ÆØÅæøå are slightly inconvenient (using AltGR on Linux, and Option on Mac), but you quickly adapt and I find it to be worth it to have all the programming relevant characters like '"{(\| in the super convenient location of the US keyboard.

My extremely made up assumption is that the Norwegian keyboard design was designed for typewriters, and the US is an older design made by and for developers.

> US is an older design made by and for developers

I think it is the other way around. Programming languages adopted the characters that are available on US Intl.

English simply requires fewer characters, and so things that are useful for any programming language, like different kinds of brackets and quotation marks, are more prominent on US keyboards.

See qwerty-fr[1] for a keyboard layout that is based on QWERTY but with a sane placement of keys contrary to US international.

[1] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#readme

> I've met more than a few Germans, Finns, and Swedish that map their local keyboards to US English

Which is impossible to do properly, because those keyboards differ from US keyboards in their geometry, not just in the labeling of the keys.

> Which is impossible to do properly, because those keyboards differ from US keyboards in their geometry, not just in the labeling of the keys.

The only difference is that on US keyboards the enter key is smaller and left shift is larger, leading to the "\" key being moved one down and one left on a German keyboard (and also being duplicated to left of z (German label: y)). So even if you move from a physical US keyboard to a physical German one while keeping the US layout, it's literally just one key where you'd have to retrain your hand. And for people that have learned to type on a German keyboard this is not a problem at all since they have never typed on a physical US one and using a different mapping means a training period anyway.

Source: German who mapped his keyboard to US (+ some AltGr modifiers for the German characters I need).

I don't know about the other European layouts, but I assume it's somewhat similar for them too.

That is not a major issue by itself, just something to get used to. However, it becomes an issue if you have to use multiple designs.

For example: Dell ships all their laptops with ANSI-layouts, but Logitech does not ship ANSI-layouts to Europe at all.

I ended up buying my Logitech keyboard on Ebay in the US, because I wanted my layouts to be identical.

Meh, I use both layouts and it never really bothered me.

The key mapping still works. I prefer the UK layout, e.g. (which has the vertical return key instead of the horizontal enter key in US layouts). If I connect a UK keyboard and use US mapping it still works.

Generally, though, I always try to get any English layout, instead of a European one and map as I desire. For macs that would be English International.

The main issue for me has been the daft L shaped enter key.

Having started with computers and terminals using a simple horizontal bar enter, hence I generally prefer to get a US geometry keyboard when possible.

Stuff like the split pseudo-L of say the Framework keyword is acceptable, since there is still a horizontal enter.

Others at work tend to get confused by the (UK geometry) keyboard on my desk operating with a US keyboard map, simply because there are 2-3 key caps in the "wrong position"...

Keymap layout and physical layout are two orthogonal issues.

Keymap layout (e.g. US /other language vairants) is primarily user-preference software setting, unrelated to the physical hardware (except for labels, but these are not relevant for function).

Physical layout (ISO / ANSI / backwards L-shaped enter) are unrelated to its logical function.

The EurKEY post seems to offer a keymap layout, not specific physical layout, so physical geometry is irrelevant.

I do this (US keyboard layout on German keyboards) since the mid/late 90's without problems. The physical differences are not very relevant (it's just things like the size of the Return key and related to that, the location of the Backslash key).

I seem to remember that the Amiga had a German keyboard layout which was much more convenient for programmers (at least I only started the habit of using the US layout after I switched from Amiga to PC).

The Amiga layout was truly made for programmers.

As a Belgian I simply use US intl and damn AZERTY to hell and back. The biggest problem is the size of the left shift which is only "right" on the Apple US intl keyboard and just wrong on anything else in Europe.

I also hate the extra big enter key, I mean what the hell? Give me my backslash above the enter any time of the year.

Thank god I got my escape key back BTW. I needed an external keyboard just for that crap.

That is if you are lucky enough to have a choice of hardware provided by your employer, but usually "easily" fixed with an external keyboard if need be :/

Germany is pretty grim here, most not-even-huge companies will just order QWERTZ.

The Z is irrelevant, the only physical difference is the big enter and the fwslash/pipe key just very slightly rearranged.

The main problem with the German layout IMHO, and all layouts in its family, is the infuriatingly tiny left shift key. The Netherlands has the same disease. I map the useless key next to it as a shift as well, at least that way I can type without getting pinkie arthritis.

I think most European layouts suffer from tiny-shift. Mapping it to shift is a good solution.

I have a similar problem with a laptop but with Ctrl/Fn, but thankfully the BIOS let me remap it (the Fn key is not a "real" key to the OS).

I didn't say the Z was relevant, it's just how most people I know identify this layout, but fine. "German ISO keyboard?"

And no, it's also not "just" the big enter and pipe (and the left shift). It's different, and cool if it works for you, I'm thrown off nearly as much when switching to a US layout on one of those as when I had been typing on US Intl for a while and then switch to the German layout.

You can still map it to QWERTY, you just have to remember where the special characters are. It's worth it.

That's the point of EurKey. Special characters are the same as on the US layout with additional, language specific letters available. At least for writing English and German it has been great for me.

> I've met more than a few Germans, Finns, and Swedish that map their local keyboards to US English for this reason

Native french speaker here and I do the same: it's QWERTY for me. Also there's just sheer insanity: like in Belgium, which is a tiny country, you have different layouts. And "french french" layout is different than "french belgian" etc. It just makes zero sense.

So I just use a QWERTY layout.

And I just set up a compose key for when I need to write in french. But then the thing is: I can write without any special character and then use a spellchecker to instantly fix everything so...

I do the same qwerty intl US.

It's about placement of;'\ :"|?>{}[] all nearby

in locales its different, every programmer should just use intl us.

mac lets you switch per app the locale too useful for writing apps

I routinely write in English, Spanish, French, and Finnish, and I code several hours a day. For me, the best layout (other than my Dactyl Manuform's, which is layered) is the standard ANSI US, with a compose key. The compose key gives me easy access to all diacriticals and accents, and I don't need to switch contexts at all.

This is me, an Italian: US keyboard or death.

I use a few European characters but I've found the best keyboard layout by far is the US key layout on a Mac. By using option you have access to all the special characters and modifiers you need.

ü ö ø å æ ê é ... Very simple to find and you'll actually remember their positions because they are (somewhat) logically placed.

At the same time, the US layout also has a very convenient setup for coding, and not any extra keys taking up space.

I'm sticking to US layout as well.

What I find annoying, is that none of the Apple dealers in my country (The Netherlands) have stocked laptops with the US key layout. You need to order it online and wait a couple of weeks.

In Austria delivery of US keyboard laptops from Apple dropped from weeks to two days on the pro models so I think they are changing something.

I prefer the US international layout (with the standing return key) and it happens to be that the Dutch layout is just US international with a '€' sign printed on the '2' key as well. So I think I'm lucky in that regard.

This has prevented me from quite a few impulse purchases of way too expensive laptops.. :)

I use the Swiss layout for the exact same reasons. Plus, it’s easy to find here in Switzerland. The only extra keys are the ones one uses a lot when typing German and French.

You don't even need to use Option — by long-pressing a letter, you have a menu opened with all the different options conveniently numbered. As an example for the letter "a": a1 is à, a2 is á ... a8 is ā.

I disable that as it takes too long. I want the character now in approx the same time it takes to type another character. Nice option to have for some users though, I guess.

That's probably one of the features I loved the most when using macOS. Wish I could find something similar for Linux, so I wouldn't have to keep switching between keyboard layouts when talking to people from the US and people from Brazil.

I think the name "European" is badly chosen - there are many languages not represented there if you consider the whole Europe. This might be "western Europe" although I am not an expert to confirm nothing is missing there either ...

I see ČĆŠŽ missing from the layout, only Đ is here from the letters used in a Croatian alphabet, Slovenian as well, although they don't use Ć.

For Romanians and Moldavian I don't see: ă â ș ț î

This is an impossible task, just use the standard "Programmers" layout for your language which maps to US and allows access to accented characters via modifiers. The entire notion of a "local" keyboard layout sounds like a nationalistic throwback to the days where the world was much smaller. Some languages really need it, but most using the Latin alphabet simply don't, just stick to US.

I think you're supposed to use the composition key for those. Don't know how frequent they are in croatian though, so it might be impairing the speed at which you can type if they are very common

You can get these with the composition keys. Shift+AltGr = ˇ and then hit the letter to compose them

No sign of Greek on it either.

Greek letters are supported using Alt Gr + M : https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/download/windows/1.2/eur...

These seem to cater for "math Greek". What about accented Greek letters (which almost every Greek word uses, to indicate where the emphasis is), or even final sigma?

Õ is also missing from Estonian.

And Portuguese.

And that keyboard is, theoretically, focused on Western European languages.

True. Lacks Polish ĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŻŹ/ąćęłńóśżź.

Any letter with ogonek is lacking, which includes į and ų.

I find it (in)amusing that it contains "ij", which I understand is only used in Dutch, but it lacks letters with ogonek, which is used in at least two official European languages (Polish and Lithuanian), which amounts to around 48 million native/fluent people.

I would like to tell you that 6,25% of 48 million speak Lithuanian

Yes, I am aware of that.

But my argument was meant in a different direction: ogonek is present in two official languages of the European Union, while "ij" is present in only one; still, "ij" got a dedicated key. That, alone, would be sufficient to state it is under-representing European languages.

Then, for shocking comparison, I used population, which, obviously, has Polish as the biggest contributor. Still, 48 million is twice the amount of speakers that might ever use "ij" (estimated in 24 million worldwide), so I think the point is still valid.

Besides, the keyboard layout is also advertised as meant for translators, and Lithuanian is special in this sense: as one of the oldest Indo-European language still in use, and considered by many the most conservative one, it is of interest for linguistic studies, which includes translation.

Like, where are my macrons, tildes and hačky? I get it that not all characters from european language alphabets can be crammed into one keyboard but next time this should be correctly named for what it really is. Someday i might learn western eurpean language if i can challenge my willpower..

This seems to suffer from the "Swiss Army Knife Syndrome": It does many things, but not one thing well.

Any individual "European" (that is, a speaker of a language which uses those Latin-extended characters) is going to want a layout where the symbols they use daily are accessible either as separate keys, or with Shift. Requiring AltGr to type é and è isn't going to fly with users who need them. And I'm certainly not going to press Shift+AltGr+A/O/U to get Ä/Ö/Ü, which I have to type many times per day.

Some parts of the layout also seem to ignore which letters are actually in use. The capital Eszett (ẞ, Shift+AltGr+S in this layout) simply isn't a thing in the real world. It has zero usage in practice. Surely that spot could be utilized for something better?

I'm sticking to my Swiss layout where äöü are directly accessible and I finally got used to it. Not switching back and Apple can suck it for having a different Swiss layout.

I think generally this layout is more for programmers. If you're programming more than writing a text in your language, eurkey is certainly the way to go. I for myself switched to it and will never look back.

I definitely prefer the ANSI left shift key, but I am keeping my ISO enter key, thank you. Indeed, I have a keyboard with an ANSI left shift and an ISO enter key.

But honestly, why not just use US Intl AltGr dead keys?

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Seriously, ANSI/ISO hybrid layout should be way more popular than it is.

Great idea! Most programmers use the US layout anyway because then stuff like [ and { are easy to reach. This project extends the US layout by adding all the usual German+French+Italian+Spanish special characters onto the regular character keys, similar to how Alt+E is the Euro sign on standard German keyboards. Alt+A is Ä, Alt+O is Ö, Alt+U is Ü and Alt+S is ß so for German, that choice seems quite intuitive.

>Most programmers use the US layout anyway

[citation needed]

Yeah... I'm one of those programmers and I've had to explain why I'm using qwerty to almost all the coworkers I've had.

I would say about 2% of programmers use a different layout than the norm here, not "most"

It always saddens me when i see microsoft windows logo for the Super key on such proposals.. easily avoidable mistake..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

I am not seeing Romanian, Bulgarian and Czech characters. Last time I've checked, those countries were in Europe.

Shameless plug: I maintain a keyboard layout that allows you to effortlessly type 15+ European languages with it. It's entirely compatible with QWERTY, so anyone can switch to it without relearning anything.

Contrary to EurKey and QWERTY international, it's a breeze to learn and use. The placement of every key is logical, you just need to learn a few simple rules and then everything makes sense!

See the project on GitHub: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr

Previous thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229583

You should mention that it is heavily french biased.

No ő, or ű for Hungarian. I personally use US International on Mac and I never looked back. It uses a system where you press Alt + a key for an accent, and then the letter to put the accent on.

That's basically a US layout with some tweaks. Nice try muricans... Jokes aside, honestly I feel confident with US (or ISO/UK) keyboard and I think that I share this sensation with the vast majority of european developers and sysadmins. Also in general the ANSI format is more aestetically pleasing than ISO one, and, above of all, if you like mechanical keyboards ANSI plates are more widespread and consequentially cheaper, so I don't oppose this proposal

The Spanish layout (as used in Spain) is the best compromise I've yet found to write code, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and would probably work fine for most other European languages with a couple more dead keys.

It's missing at least "ß" for German, has annoying dead key, but above all it's extremely awkward for coding because most symbols have been shuffled around for no good reason.

Try out altgr-intl[1] (but no dead keys, where you just press e.g. AltrGr+E for "é", might not be installed on windows/mac). It's much better than Spanish for Spanish, can be used for the mentioned languages and probably some Scandinavian, and doesn't make writing code awkward.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_QWERTY_keyboard_langua...

A keyboard without dead keys for accents is a non starter for me. Thanks!

without? Why would you want to require more key-presses?

Because a keyboard has a fixed number of keys.

If you want to have a bunch of letters of the alphabet with any the diacritics on top, you run out of keys very very quickly. Dead keys are the sane solution to that question.

Also, regarding ß, I've got it in two ways: "AltGr + s," or the sequence "Compose, s, s."

By the way, Compose is the ultimate dead key.

Fun to see they have included the dutch Ĳ ligature. I think nobody ever uses this and just types out I and J. I previous employer told now and again made a search for the word 'vrij' (free) on Slack to see if people were honest with there holidays. So when sending a message that I took a day free I would use 'vrĳ', just to troll.

European language - there is no such thing so there is no need for such keyboard layout.

Agreed. You can't have normal usage letters behind AltGr when writing your own language, that'll get annoying fast.

Having the name wrong, because the author forgot that Eastern Europe has been part of Europe for around 1000 years now, is acceptable. But the decision to support 5.5 speakers of Danish instead of 40 million speakers of Polish for example, is much worse, it's stupid engineering.

There was a day when I had to switch between Japanese-Swedish-US physical keyboard due to differences between my laptop, office's machine, and some other machines I had to take care of.

The problem with switching keyboard like this is not the placement of alphabet, but the different location of symbols. Like, "/" and "-" have the same location between US and swedish keyboard, respectively. And this cost me a lot of context switching.

Decided to screw it, by bringing my US keyboard everywhere, and (virtually) switch to another keyboard just if I need to, i.e., to write particular characters like "ö,ä,å".

Also ã/Ã seems missing?

While it's a nice idea and usually I am a sucker for all things starting with European*, it seems to fall short and the practical use seems limited - who is writing more than 3-4 languages at a time?

I'll stick to my AutoHotkey macros to put portuguese ã/ç/õ via AltGr on my german keyboard:

  <^>!a::Send {ASC 0227}
  +<^>!A::Send {ASC 0195}
  <^>!c::Send {ASC 0231}
  +<^>!C::Send {ASC =199}
  <^>!o::Send {ASC 0245}
  +<^>!O::Send {ASC 0213}

(+1 for my fellow ISO Return key users in the thread)

I use US layout with Caps Lock mapped to toggle to my "native" layout. This way I can easily code without RSI-inducing combinations to get the frequently used {}[]\, and just tap caps when I'm writing emails without needing to retrain my muscle memory of where åäö are located.

On Windows there's also a setting to get each app to remember the selected keyboard layout (Set-WinLanguageBarOption -UseLegacySwitchMode) so I don't even need to switch most times.

Not seeing the Polish letters ą, ę, or ł anywhere on the keyboard. Poland is in Europe, too.

Not seeing the Romanian letters ș, ț, ă, â, î anywhere on the keyboard. Romania is in Europe, too.

(â and î are even needed in French, what am I missing here?)

I'm sure there must be many other letters missing. Not to mention Bulgaria and Greece.

No qualms with the layout, it's probably impossible to cram all European letters and common programming symbols on only ~four layers -- it's just the name that's somewhat provocative.

Interesting reference: https://jakubmarian.com/special-characters-diacritics-used-i...

The obvious solution would be to have all variants of a "base" character like a or e be accessible via the same key + shift/TAB/option, etc. So s would include ś, ș, etc. Obviously this doesn't line up exactly with how the letters are used in their respective languages, but it's a visually-optimized solution.

There are too many combinations though.

à á â ã ā ă ȧ ä ả å ǎ ȁ ȃ ą ạ ḁ ẚ ầ ấ ẫ ẩ ằ ắ ẵ ẳ ǡ ǟ ǻ ậ ặ

You'd need to hold down combinations of 5 different modifier keys, and shift can't be one of them because that's used to capitalize all this. Nobody's going to do that.

You’re going to pry my ISO Enter key and QWERTZ from my cold, dead hands.

Found the fellow German here :D

CH layout for the win

This looks like a case of design by committee, e.g. due to the compromises none of the target audiences are actually happy.

I just use this for the German "Umlaute" it's the easiest way to get them while not putting special characters in hard to reach places (backslash anyone?). Easy to install and set up and as a bonus I can type greek letters for math stuff now!

Same, just use this as an US layout + umlauts. Because sometimes you need them, but otherwise the US layout is just way better than QWERTZ (IMO, i'm programming 90% of the time and life in zsh and sway).

"European" keyboard layout that's ANSI and not ISO? Is this a joke?

Exactly so.

Plain Polish layout is much better and much more „European” than this thing. You can input all the accented letters from all over the Europe (not only letters from Polish alphabet) using combining strokes. For example, ä is "Alt+[ a". In addition to that there's assortment of math/greek characters, many punctuation characters (incl. full set of all the various quotes and arrows, which is handy) and even some Latin ligatures.

The single exception is T-comma (used in Romanian), LATIN {CAPITAL,SMALL} LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW, which AFAIK is impossible to input.

I am dismayed that there is so little mention of the Compose key.

It is one of the biggest keyboard-related boons of using any xNix OS, and it's trivially easy to add to Windows as well.

It's one of the only things I dislike about macOS: no Compose key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey

No way. “Ñ” is not in the natural place for Spanish speaking people.

On Windows, I'm fairly happy with the "Pseudo VT320" layout from https://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ . All added characters and accents are via AltGr dead keys, so it's not in the way of normal programming. It would be nice to have a few more dead key combinations for northern and eastern European accents though.

No way this is going to work for Finnish use. The person who has made this clearly has no idea that in Finnish ä, ö are completely separate letters from a, o

As the guy is German and most certainly uses ä/ö/ü/ß, he probably has an idea.

You mean that it's cumbersome to have it hidden behind a key combo instead of it being its own physical key, correct? I get that, because it would slow you down tremendously. At the same time, if those letters would be physical keys, it would not be a European keyboard anymore, but a Finnish keyboard. So maybe the conclusion is that this project is nice for some languages, but not for all. In my language this keyboard would work, but letters like ö, ï and é are relatively rare and I'm actually content with the solution that I already have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key. So for me it doesn't actually solve anything.

If I’m mostly writing Finnish text, then the native Finnish layout (with separate keys for Å, Ä, and Ö) seems better. And if I’m coding, I personally prefer the US English layout where [, {, ;, etc. are more easily accessible. But I could see this layout being a better fit if I’d need to frequently swap between multiple different languages and still have convenient access to the most common symbols used in coding.

This is the reason why just using local layout (or modification of it) makes the most sense. The keys are where they are for good reason. That said do you ever really need å or Å in finnish layout?

If you're a Swedish-speaking Finn (like Linus Torvalds), yes.

I use something similar to this. Although as a Spanish, the acute accent is prioritized on the main vowels: aeiou -> áéíóú, with alt-gr, and the dieresis (¨) is only used with the u (ü) so I leave it at a chord (alt-gr ', u)

https://github.com/kikito/us-4-es.keylayout

Proposing a layout based on US-ANSI is the definition of madness. We can discuss what's on the keys, but my ISO layout stays.

I really like my "`" in the convenient corner of the keyboard (and even more so with Markdown getting much use in GitHub and Slack), so for me the ISO layout can go to the trash pile of history :)

The British / Irish layout is ISO and has ` in the corner.

I happen to be using this (present by default on Ubuntu 18 iirc). I'm surprised this makes me a bit of an outlier judging by the comments. EurKEY on a Dell XPS, with the Home/PgUP and End/PgDn flipped to get start/end of line in my editor right next to the arrow keys, right CTRL mapped to DEL. I am quite happy with that setup.

No thanks, that layout is terrible and looks impossible to type on

If I want to type åäö or ÅÄÖ they're right there on my keyboard, with this it's hidden behind AltGr/Shift+AltGr

Enter key is too small and a bunch of other complaints, like everything is much further away or requires both hands compared to my current layout

This looks pretty similar to UK extended [0].

I prefer UK extended for the position of back-slash and point keys, and a few other details.

This said, EurKEY seems to provide more, like a way to type ś or ć ...

[0]: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdukx/

Why did you bother to reserve space but then add an application key (context menu key) instead of an Fn key? Most desktop layouts already commit the crime of omitting the left Fn key, the least you can do is leave alone the one on the right.

You're just begging for people to flash QMK and repurpose Caps Lock...

There's no such thing as a standard Fn key, that's handled by the keyboard itself. Standard layouts don't have a Fn at all.

I don't know if I ever mentioned "standard" layouts? Anyway, I just looked it up, and apparently keyboard designers tend to replace right meta (the right windows key in this diagram) with Fn, and this layout still has one, so it's actually not missing a spot like I thought...

For my mixed English/Romanian/coding use, I use Romanian (Programmers), never found anything better.

Great idea! Beats having to switch to the german keyboard all the time just to input umlauts.

The german layout is so suboptimal for actual work, its funny.

Z and are Y switched, so to UNDO you have to almost break your wrist.

Then they just randomly rearranged all the punctuation and symbols.

Why did the parentheses open-close move by one? Who knows…

Now that I have a (zmk) programmable keyboard, one of the more frustrating things is getting it to produce characters that are not in the OS keyboard map. I think the best option might be to have a keymap that included more or less all characters so that they could be produced.

I stopped messing with the keyboard firmware / unicode, and just use altgr-intl. Except for some macros like typing out my email :)

This is the exact sort of thing I was hoping someone would suggest. Thanks!

I forgot to add: the big upside is that you can then use the builtin laptop keyboard the same way. If you're on linux you can even kind of translate firmware mappings to xkb mappings for xorg and sway at least.

I still don’t like when number keys are taking ten keys on the unmodified keyboard. In AZERTY you would need shift to enter them, and that’s fine because anyway numbers are usually by group. While a lot of keys requiring caps are braces that you will enter twice.

This looks manic.

I'll stick to UK ISO, thanks.

UK ISO is indeed the best for me as well, as a software developer. Having @ and " swapped makes so much sense for me, I don't know why.

I also much prefer having \ and | located next to the left shift key. It's a single hand input, and the large enter key is so much nicer.

Probably just preference from experience, but whenever I see people trying to force ANSI layout with other char sets, or adding missing keys such as £ it just looks awful.

Though not as bad as UK Mac.

Was using this for years until openSUSE Leap somehow dropped this with 15.4 and now I'm flip/flopping US/German QWERTY on all machines again.

Some European languages with missing letters: Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian, Czech... they could possibly just as well go with US layout instead...

I always feel like a computer illerate when googling something like 'u umlaut' to copy it from wikipedia.

Any reason why the € symbol is on the 5, instead of the 4 (which is its standard location on Irish keyboards)?

Upvote if you're in the Azerty gang

Belgian Azerty represent!

Canadian Multilingual layout > Azerty. You can actually type uppercase accented letters with it!

Useless for Polish, but thankfully we already use US layout

What's wrong with just a US layout?

It's really hard to type out (e.g.) German text with the US layout.

How do I type ä or ö?

> How do I type ä

<COMPOSE> " a

where COMPOSE is typically ALTGR, but you can map it anywhere you want, like CAPSLOCK

I write daily in three european languages with many accented characters, and this is enough for all of them. I have even mapped composing a to α, b to β and so on, which is useful for the (occasional) greek word.

EDIT: (thanks to gpvos comment below), on linux with xorg you can achieve this by the following configuration:

   # setup base keyboard layoud and model
   setxkbmap us
   setxkbmap -model evdev

   # set compose to right alt
   setxkbmap -option compose:ralt

   # disable capslock sticky effect, set it as modifier
   setxkbmap -option caps:ctrl_modifier
   xkbset nullify lock

   # enable dead greek letters
   xmodmap -e "keycode 148 = dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek"
   xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek dead_greek"

   # swap brackets with parens (useful for programming)
   xmodmap -e "keycode 18 = 9 bracketleft"
   xmodmap -e "keycode 19 = 0 bracketright" 
   xmodmap -e "keycode 34 = parenleft braceleft"
   xmodmap -e "keycode 35 = parenright braceright"

   # enable ridiculously fast repeat
   xset r rate 250 120

This nearly works on openbsd (you have to install the xkbset package, maybe there is another way). I guess that on macos and windows you can do similar things.

That must be painful unless you write foreign sentence just a few times a day. I'd install IME at that point, which basically gives you switchable keyboard layouts. たとえば、日本語をCOMPOSEキーで書いてみたら？

This is the case for most programmers in Europe. {, |, and similar are more important than accented characters, but you do need accents a few times a day. And it's easy to get used to.

Your comment is useless if you do not specify which OS and keyboard layout you are using, or which mapping utility. This is absolutely not standard everywhere.

It was a default on some Unix systems, and is an easy configuration option on Linux.

Search "Compose key".

¿Qué?

In most European languages you will want to type an occasional é, ä or ø. Preferably without having to remember character codes, and with logical keyboard combinations.

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