A visual comparison of different national layouts on a computer keyboard (2019) | Hacker News Reader

A visual comparison of different national layouts on a computer keyboard (2019)

farah.cl

53 pointsAgrMohit26 comments

1. The author mentions that the french (belgian) layout is more popular in luxembourg that the swiss (french) layout. Anecdotally, I can not agree with this. As a luxembourgish person, encountering many keyboards in schools, offices, through laptops i bought etc, the swiss (french) layout is by far the most common. I have never seen an Azerty used in practice except by french people. The second most common seems to be German Qwertz, that could also be because there is no amazon.lu but instead most people i know order through amazon.de which of course mostly shows german keyboards so its easy to buy it on accident.

2. I once did an exchange semester of university in France, where i was forced to use their computers for programming. Not only did I start 2 weeks after the other students due to timing issues with my primary university, but then I also had some very stressful weeks learning to program on azerty keyboards. It was very painful at first and i nearly went back to two-finger typing, but in the end after 5 months i became more fluent than i expected on azerty.

3. 3 years ago (i was around 24 years old) I decided to switch from my layout i used until then (ISO, swiss french) to the Ansi Us layout, and I am happy i did the switch. It is so much better for programming, especially wrt to [] {} (). And I even prefer typing diacritics by using US international. I write fluently in french and german with this and I like it. The main pain point was switching from vertical to horizontal enter, I typed \ for months...

You can use US international layout on an ISO keyboard, then you get is access to all the types of parenthesis while keeping the vertical enter. That's what I do, it doesn't matter what lettes are on the key caps.

I was aware of this, but I chose to go to Ansi since it seemed that lots of gaming and special ergonomic keyboards used Ansi and i may be curious in the future to try them

> As a luxembourgish person, encountering many keyboards in schools, offices, through laptops i bought etc, the swiss (french) layout is by far the most common. I have never seen an Azerty used in practice except by french people.

I won't disagree with that but, living in Luxembourg, I head to the closest supermarket, a "Cora" also selling keyboards, mice, USB sticks, etc. and I can buy an AZERTY layout if I want to (they've got both QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards).

That said, just like you: I type using a QWERTY layout.

Yeah good point, I also checked hifi.lu and saturn.lu and in both cases azerty seems to be top suggested choice. Its just weird to me, because I have never encountered azerty in the wild in luxembourg. All family, friends (all but one), colleagues, .. use the swiss layout. And I also know that default choice at university of luxembourg and the government is swiss french...

The biggest issue for Mac users is the placement of the `command` key on the US ANSI keyboards - which is the layout for pretty much all mechanical keyboards. And the missing left `fn` key.

It requires you to curl your thumb awkwardly when resting on the home row or WASD.

It is between the Z and X, but on MacBook keyboard it is directly under the X so your thumb can rest straight.

The only keyboard I have found that has a similar MacBook layout is the Niz Plum Micro84[1] with dome switches.

There was also the discontinued NuPhy F1 that had a fn key but still had a terrible command placement.

I don't know why more Mac users don't complain about this.

[1]: https://epomaker.com/products/niz-plum-84-bluetooth [2]: https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/nutype-f1

One solution to this problem is to remap caps lock to cmd, which can be easily done in the settings.

This is really stupid, old, legacy sh*t. If the USB HumanInoutDevice spec would support full unicode, keyboards could just send unicode directly and not rely on a not-known-by-the-keyboard-firmware language setting. The language settings would be implemented in the keyboard firmware, but with todays hardware shouldn't be a problem.

Edit: typos

While I get the sentiment, implementing full Unicode support directly in the keyboard firmware would pose challenges. Consider mechanical keyboards where keys are swappable; you'd need a mechanism to inform the firmware of the current configuration, either through dip switches or a separate firmware tool. It's not as straightforward as it might seem.

That and also it wouldn't be able to express modifier key state, locks, etc, so it would have to coexist with the existing scancode-based input methods.

If you represent Unicode codepoints as unsigned 32-bit integers, you have the eleven high bits free for representing modifier keys. You can even represent changes of state for the modifier keys without a normal key press by sending the modifier bits with a NUL character.

Some standard for storing or otherwise representing the keyboard layout in hardware would be nice. Or at least some kind of identifier that says what kind of keyboard it is enough to build a table of the most common layouts.

Hell, while we're dreaming here, it'd be nice to have OS-level support for telling which devices keypresses come from so you can have a different layout on every connected keyboard or even turn extra keyboards into macro pads. (I've seen some setups like this, each with varying levels of jank.)

> Some standard for storing or otherwise representing the keyboard layout in hardware would be nice.

The keyboards by Sun Microsystems did do that, and their USB versions used the standard.

Right now any keyboard can use any layout transparently, minus the keycaps printing but fingers don't have eyes, so it doesn't really matter. Changing that is what would be really stupid.

Quick nitpick on Polish keyboard layouts. The "Polish (standard)" is more often referred to as the "typist" layout in Poland. IBM's docs say this is required for government contracts. I haven't seen it in any dev or home environments, but it wouldn't surprise me if some compliance-focused IT departments in the government enforce it.

<Note the duplicated entries for two of the diacritics that are used in Polish.> - did the author conflate ż with ź? A rookie mistake! :)

I'm running the 'pl' layout on my Linux box. The Alt(Gr) layer outputs the following: ≠²³¢€½§·«»–śðæŋ’ə…łźć„”ńµ≤≥. Some are expected (diacritics, €), but the presence of characters like ¢, ð, æ, ŋ, and ə is somewhat baffling, I wonder what's the history here.

Keyboards like these are the worst kind of tech debt: they're literally a pain. Layouts like QWERTY, AZERTY, and so on reproduce the same layouts from nineteenth-century mechanical typewriters, which were designed to be inefficient, to avoid key jam. This explains why the most frequent letters of European languages, like E for English, require moving your left hand. Anyone designing a keyboard layout today would place the E on the home row of the right hand. The staggered-row design, too—where the Q row is shifted to the left of the A row, is also inherited from the typewriter days. This causes the left hand to crank back to the left unnaturally. When you add in the faraway placements of common keys, like Control, Backspace, or Delete, you have a recipe for repetitive stress injuries.

There are simple solutions to these problems. You can use a better keyboard layout, like Colemak or Dvorak, with your existing keyboard. The letters won't match the ones printed on the keys but if you touch-type it doesn't matter. If that bothers you, you can swap out your key caps, or use stickers. You can also just buy a well-designed keyboard. I use an Atreus keyboard, from Keyboardio, which fixes all of these problems, but there are lots of great keyboards which are commercially available, like the Planck or the ErgoDox, which help to fix the stagger problem.

Converting from vertical Enter to horizontal Enter when moving to the USA was a real frustration. I spent the first 4 years just importing British keyboards.

Yes and the missing key is frustrating too. Trying to find | and ` and \ on a laptop that doesn't have all the keys is so painful I just add the US keyboard layout to my menu bar.

I miss my chunky Enter key! Also whenever I have to write a currency value in £ I'm always annoyed that I need to go to the Wikipedia entry for "Pound sign" and copy it from there. There's probably an easier way, but it comes up so infrequently and I'm far too lazy to learn.

Are you me? LOL

There is an ALT+ for it, but I can never remember it, despite needing it at least once a week.

I came to the opposite conclusion and started importing US keyboards into the UK. I figured the UK layout I was used to wasn't different enough to justify existing, and the US layout has primacy because it's effectively the reference layout for programming language syntax design.

Keyboard layouts are such a pet peeve of mine on so many layers. Using custom keyboards and/or layouts is a pain because there is no standard way of defining layout and furthermore most systems do not support arbitrary layers/modifiers/layouts which are critical for reduced key count keyboards. The standard national layouts often being poor fit for technical use only makes the situation more annoying.

> The standard national layouts often being poor fit for technical use only makes the situation more annoying.

Definitely!

And the absolute biggest pain with physical keyboard layouts is that if you use anything not standard then you're sorry out of luck when you buy a laptop (until your carry your external keyboard with you in addition to your laptop).

Even buying a common laptop with a US ANSI physical layout (wide enter key, not tall) is not trivial in Europe. It's doable but it requires some research/planning.

> This used to be the standard keyboard layout in the Netherlands, but at some point (seemingly, during the late ’90s), it was abandoned in favor of the English (US international) layout, laid on top of ISO keyboards (although ANSI units are a common sight and ANSISO models can be spotted every now and then). Worse, the keyboards commonly sold in that country print the legends for the regular English (USA) layout, with the only addition of the euro sign (€) on the bottom-right corner of the 5 % keycap. Why aren’t the rest of the tertiary (AltGr) and quaternary (AltGr‑Shift) layer assignments printed is a mystery, but cost-saving and laziness are quite probably to blame.

I assume it’s because:

1) those symbols are rarely used in the Dutch language, so there’s no need to label them

2) pre-euro keyboards were presumably simply US keyboards (IIRC guilders were simply denoted by ‘fl.’). With the introduction of the euro, there came a need to type its associated symbol, which then led to the € symbol being printed on the 5 key (and AltGr being printed on the right Alt key).

I loathe the cost-cutting keyboard manufacturers have turned to over the recent years.

I cannot get a good danish keyboard anymore without the ÆØÅ keys having the Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish/Suomi keys printed on them as well, often in different colors.

My decade+ old "Logitech Illuminated" keyboard has been the best keyboard I've ever had but recently it's been acting up for me. It occasionally adds diacritics to random letters. Tried cleaning it with no luck. It was a danish-only version, laptop-like flat keys but with more "travel-distance" so it feels like the best of both worlds. Also had a nice flat palm-rest.

Unfortunately I can't get this keyboard or find something that has a similar form factor anymore anywhere - and if I can find some version of it, it has the the terrible multi-country-cost-cutting-keys on it. I suppose that if I find a replacement keyboard that I can move the old keys over to the new one (if they are even the same after all these years)

Some very lengthy pages on the subject of keyboards, no mention of ISO/IEC 9995-1 anywhere, nor any mention of "104-key", "105-key", "109-key" et al. in favour of some very confusing and idiosyncratic "ANSI", "ANSISO", "ISANSI" nomenclature instead, which the site proceeds to explain is confusing, wrong, and a popular (at least in the United States, the site says) misconception.

If it is confusing and wrong, it's a bad idea to base all of the other explanations on that terminology, because it just reinforces something that should not be reinforced. Yes, "109-key" can be off by as much as 20 keys; but it avoids implying the whole "ISO versus ANSI" nonsense, and making up things like "ISANSI" from whole cloth; and at least does imply that the important difference from "104-key" is 5 extra physical keys in various places.

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