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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

A Swedish keyboard layout works for Norwegian, as long as the Ö maps to Ø and Ä maps to Æ. Or the Danish as well, except there for some reason Æ must map to Ø and Ø must map to Æ, otherwise they're identical. So most keyboards sold in Scandinavia just has one button with ØÖÆ on it and another with ÆÄØ on it, and then based on OS keyboard setting you get the correct one.

Point is, I'm curious why they also just don't release in Norway when they have made the layout? But I guess it's because we're not in the EU that makes it harder?

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Personally I just use a US layout with alt gr for æøå. The Norwegian layout is very awkward for C style languages(and the unix shell), I find. The US one feels more natural, which makes sense considering the modern US layout is very similar to the layout of the teletypes used at bell labs in the 70s.

Took a while to get used to it, but only a month or so to be just as fast as I was previously on the Norwegian one.

Agreed, takes honestly a very short time to get used to it but the benefits are large, as a programmer at least. I don't think I would ever go back to the other layout again.

Yeah. Norwegian living in the UK, and I use a US layout as well. I do have a keybinding to swap to Norwegian keymap that I use occasionally, but it doesn't see much use.

I use US layout instead of danish as well, it's much better for development, and æøå is easily available on Mac:

æ = option + '

ø = option + o

å = option + a

My reason for learning the US layout back in the days was because of Counter Strike. For some reason it didn't adhere to your OS keyboard settings when chatting, so trying to write ø always became ; etc, so we kinda after a while just learned how it worked (didn't even know it was a US layout thing to look up, just bruteforced and memorized).

The danish layout is brain damaged indeed. My greatest daily annoyance is shift+7 to get "/", when navigating around folders in the terminal, but on the other hand I have ~30 years of built up muscle memory at this point.

This right here is the best solution. Been using that for maybe 15 years.

Lack of keyboard as my reason for not buying a Framework laptop when upgrading last year. I wouldn't mind them releasing a Nordic keyboard, which isn't ideal but better than nothing (as a migrant I'm never quite sure what character I'll get when I hit those keys!).

It seems Norway is often left out as being outside the EU and having it's own tax, customs and consumer rights requirements puts a large burden on companies to officially support a market here, especially when it's a relatively small market.

The | and \ keys are different places on Norwegian and Danish keyboards.

I always wondered why the special non-language characters are in different places in various language specific keyboards.

Do Danish people not pipe their standard output as much? Do Swiss people not write emails as much? Are Europeans bad at finding the return key, thus requiring a larger one than Americans? These are all things I've actually come across.

Why are the special characters in all sorts of weird places? One of the great mysteries of life.

On other side I always found weird that ANSI layout has this weird monster key for | \ like are those so often used it needs bigger key? Why not just used standard sized key for normal thing...

Also why miss such useful symbols as ¤ ½ § from layout?

I think most layout differences come from back then typewriters and word processors were the most that was available, and nothing got changed due to inertia.

Going back and forth between " and @ being capital-2 daily is probably the one that's caused me the most frustration.

The mandatory 5 years warranty is scary perhaps.

Oh… My framework laptop is two years old now and it starts showing. Had to replace the fan already (twice in fact) and now some random stuff with keyboard started to happen.

10 year old thinkpad in comparison can still be used both as a daily driver, a hammer and to barricade oneself during the zombie apocalypse

Those ThinkPads still had a separate magnesium alloy structure frame of course they are indestructible. (Marketing term used to be "roll cage")

That's more or less the reliability of modern laptops for you.

I had to replace the fans in my ASUS after less than two years, but the official manufacturer's parts store was out of stock so I had to rely on Ali Express. After that I had to go through the process of replacing them, which was anything but simple.

You can't buy quality any more, but at least you can have repairability.

Need to translate the manual to Norsk, it’s expensive or smth

You wouldnt have to make a lot of changes to the Danish manual for it to be Norwegian. Most words you could just keep as is

Yeah, I'm Danish but grew up in Norway, it's almost interchangeable. A few harder sounds in Norwegian, so change a few g's to k's etc. And Danish for some reason just litters commas randomly in a sentence, so just remove half of them randomly. And then remember the different meaning of "må" (NO=must, DK=may) when writing your manual, and you're good to go!

Soo, "kan"= "can" in norwegian and "must" in danish? Is that correct?

I had a quite awkward interaction with a danish exchange student once due to the different meaning of "må" once

Yeah, not in the EU makes it more expensive (customs), warranties, and more bureaucratic for a small market.

I am sure they will eventually, but quicker and less friction to expand to EU countries and later maybe to other EEA countries.

It will not be a hardware issues. All costs, red tape and priorities.

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