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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if it's possible to buy thinkpads with a US keyboard layout in Europe? Any thinkpad with a layout that's not the non-qwerty local variant of my country takes more than 6 weeks to deliver, and that is to get UK layout, not the US layout with different enter key, which I can't even find available at all

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Yes - you want their "EU" layout. It's "US" with a € sign.

US keyboards have 1 key less, a bigger left shift key and a 1 row enter key. It's not simply a matter of putting the right stickers on them.

I'd much prefer if companies used the actual technical names for such layouts, i.e. ISO and ANSI. It's always hard to check the layout details to find out if what they call "English" means ANSI (US) or ISO (European).

Isn't the English (EU) layout close enough? I think it's basically the US layout with a Euro sign somewhere, but the physical key layout should be the same as a regular US keyboard.

Definitely not close enough for a programmer who uses symbols and touch typing.

For starters the return key are different widths, which is a deal breaker if you’re a touchtyper used to wider return keys.

Programming also uses tilde and other symbols that are different between the two.

Overall they’re similar for typing alphabets, but symbols and enter key are different.

Just map the character set you want to the keyboard and start using it. It'll take some getting used to but if you're a touch typist it mostly comes natural. Living in Sweden, using a P50 with a UK layout which I switch between US-intl and Swedish layouts there isn't always that much relation between what's on the keys and what appears on the screen but by now I'm used to it. As a bonus it makes shoulder surfing passwords an exercise in futility...

His problem I think is that in europe we have the enter key using 2 rows, and in USA it uses 1 row only.

So probably he hits what on my keyboard is "ù" when he wants to enter.

I own a laptop with a USA keyboard and I dislike that, because no amount of mapping can change the fact that USA layout has 1 key less.

That's a UK English keyboard. The International English keyboard uses the US layout.

The "generic" layout names are ISO (European) versus ANSI (US). The ISO Enter key is two keys tall and narrower. ISO also has a shorter left Shift key, which leaves space for an extra key.

Dell has a few models with keyboards that accept both layouts, but in most laptops the "grid" above the keys prevents switching between them, which makes it really annoying if you ever buy one with an ISO layout, hoping to be able to just buy an ANSI keyboard later to replace it...

Yes, I've been able to get them. You should be able to find an International English or US English Euro layout. --This is the standard keyboard used in The Netherlands, by the way.

>Does anyone know if it's possible to buy thinkpads with a US keyboard layout in Europe?

Order them from the Netherlands, Romania or other EU countries that use the US-INT layout.

eBay

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