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Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

Finally, someone offering a proper Danish keyboard. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have long been stymied with the low-effort that is the Nordic keyboard layout. The problem is if you are not familiar with keyboards, then the labels are supposed to help you, but they don't on the Nordic layouts, because it just show three different keymap's labels on some keys, but you don't know which belong to which.

I know Apple also offers a proper Danish keyboard, and I've seen some modern Thinkpads with proper Danish keyboards.

I normally use a US Intl keyboard, but whenever I see a Danish keyboard, I struggle to find the | key.

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Nordic keyboards were a mistake. Should be redone. They are bad for both writing and coding. Changed to US International years ago too, and will never go back.

Yep, agreed. I'm using US Dvorak with modifications to get those äös.

Coding in Swedish keyboard mode in a Mac with (){}[] all on the same two keys with various vulcan neck pinching modifiers is definitely not one of my favourite things!

That's an Apple thing, though.

Oh, I'd assumed this was specific to Swedish Mac keyboards and not a more general Mac thing! How vile!

Not much better on standard Norwegian(non-apple) keyboards. ()[] are on the same two number keys and {} are on the keys surrounding those keys. []{} require alt gr while () require shift. Also $ is alt gr+5 which is revolting. Combined with / being at shift+7, typing in the shell is a terrible experience.

Yeah, I have a Swedish layout Dell as well and it's better but not much. I'm confused now, though, as I took the parent as telling me that non-Swedish Macs also have the horrible symbol placement for the various braces. (rsynnott above clarifies that it's indeed Swedish-specific so it's just the Macs are a bit worse than the PCs).

I'm fairly adept at switching between British PC keyboard, Swedish PC keyboard, and Swedish Mac keyboard nowadays, but the latter's significantly the worst (and don't get me started on how default IntelliJ key combos work with that)

I think those are all the same on Swedish PC keyboards too, except $ -- yup, that was AltGr-4, not 5. And yeah, not lovely... Why have I put up with this for over 30 years?!?

It's def. not like that on their US or UK/IE keyboards.

I've sticked to US Intl + AltGr as modifier key to access åäö in the usual location for ~a decade now. Managed to get the same config working on both Linux and macOS.

I don't care much about keyboard layouts anymore. I use a mix of FI/UK/US normal/Mac layouts almost daily, and it rarely matters much. Maybe the layout used to be a bigger deal before smartphones, but touchscreen interfaces have taught me to expect that the layout changes randomly all the time.

You definitely haven't use any of the nordic or the common nordic keyboards then. Its not the changing around that is the issue, its the absolute backwards positioning of key (heh) keys that is the problem.

I used the Finnish layout almost exclusively for 20+ years, and I didn't find it particularly inconvenient. I needed äö at least as often as ()[]{}/|\$@, and no alternate layout was clearly better than the default.

If there was a dedicated Finnish layout (instead of a shared Finnish/Swedish one), it could be a bit better by using the å key for something more common. But apart from that, I haven't seen any suggestions that would make the layout better.

I find that some keyboard shortcuts, in programs that use "weird" keys like, say, Alt-semicolon or Ctrl-backslash, don't work with a Nordic keyboard. I've hypothesised it's because we need to use modifiers to get to those characters in the first place; maybe the programs read keyboard scan codes directly in stead of OS-mediated character codes (or vice versa), Idunno... You never run into that?

Yea, there are some programs that expect me to be able to press Ctrl-/ or something - but / is shift-7 so i'd actually have to press ctrl-shift-7, which in 99.9% of cases never works.

It's easier to just remap the shitty hotkeys to something better.

I'm really happy Poland went with the US layout (with right Alt "abuse"). Makes it very easy when buying computer equipment.

Unless you buy out of shelf Mac. The default is the weird "international" layout with tall Enter key.

åäö are fine. But I had to create a custom layout a few years back for the insanity that is {}[]`~$.

And why do we have μ? (I know it's because it's a metric prefix but has anyone ever used it instead of u?)

You try it once, and you see which colour applies to your language. It's not really a big deal. (And even that's only required to disambiguate between danish and norwegian.)

As someone who grew up having to write both on a regular basis, it was neat having both on the same layout. Now that I use Linux it doesn't matter as much since altgr lets me type æø instead of äö, but back on Windows you'd have to switch layout for that.

It's too bad they didn't at least ship nordic as a separate option.

I'm looking down at my nordic layout keyboard I've owned to ten years. I have no idea which color is which language.

What are the colors?

If I were tasked to design them, I'd take the red from the Danish flag, yellow from the Swedish one and the blue from the Finnish flag..

There isn't really a standard colour scheme AFAIK, but you can tell quickly which one you need to care about.

And by the way, it's generally swedish/danish/norwegian. The finnish layout is basically the same as the swedish one.

Oh no, I forgot about Norway!

I guess the blue would be for Norway then.

You don't need to differentiate between Swedish and Finnish, since the layouts are identical, but between Danish and Norwegian, because Ø and Æ swap places between those two. (So, blue for Norwegian?)

The one with Ö left is swedish, Ø left is norwegian, Æ left is danish.

Mine are all the same colour, so no help there... But generally, ÄÖ is Swedish / Finnish, and ØÆ / ÆØ is Danish and Norwegian.

But which of the latter two is which, and why on earth did they flip those two around between the languages??? So fricking weird...

Colour? They're all white

Even worse for Icelandic ones. Keychron used to show the Icelandic flag on their Nordic keyboard page, despite that layout not including Icelandic-specific characters (Ð / Þ missing, Ö in the wrong place). I asked them to start including those characters, but now they just removed the flag.

For Framework I went with a blank ISO layout.

While we're talking about keyboards, why won't they put dedicated page up/down keys ? There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos. It's one of the reasons that makes me cling on my old Thinkpad for so long, I use them all the time.

My T420's keyboard has some next/previous page keys there. I have zero idea what to use those for. The previous page key makes a nice additional modifier key though (e.g. for Compose) as it's next to the Ctrl key.

> There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos.

In my opinion and experience it’s utter shite: the precision of fingers on half keys is not great, so it’s way too easy to hit the page keys when just trying to move two characters sideways, and now you need a few seconds to realise what the fuck just happened.

It’s exactly what my current work laptop has, and if I had to use its internal keyboard for any length of time the laptop would long have gone out the window.

If I’m paging, it’s easy enough and a lot more intentional to press the FN up/down key. I could see the argument for TKL laptops but this is garbage and I hate it.

Inspired from physical newspaper reading, how about page right/left keys too? Think of infinite canvas apps, games, web carousel, etc.

From reading comments around, is this "Nordic" layout just those four different languages overtyped on top of each others for users to ignore irrelevant parts? That sounds insane.

It shouldn't really be all that bad; it's just two letters that differ -- both in actual font design and keyboard placement. Swedish and Finnish write the letters Ö and Ä; in Danish and Norwegian they're Æ and Ø. The really weird thing is that the latter swap places between the languages; in Danish the keys are Æ to the left, Ø to the right; in Norwegian it's the other way around. So we have these two keys to the right of L that are marked, respectively, ØÖÆ and ÆÄØ.

Fortunately, the Å key seems to be the same for all four languages, and stay put in the row above the aforementioned ones, to the right of P.

And a bunch of symbols

lol someone hasn’t seen some international keyboards.

Can someone explain to my why some keyboard layouts hide some of the most important terminal punctuation in everyday use? For example, on an Apple Swedish keyboard you're not allowed to natively access your home directory ~, nor pipe anything |.

What idiot came up with that, or is there legitimate reason?

They come from typewriters presumably, not designed for teletypes nevermind modern terminal emulators.

localized keyboards layouts are quite a bit old.

They're recycling typewriter layouts that optimized for what was at the time more important to the average user, making common non-latin characters more accessible.

And arguably, for the average user, it's still the right choice. It's only IT nerds who really need all those weird extra characters that aren't even real punctuation, and they can just switch over to the US layout.

That's true, but also not really an explanation. There is a Polish keyboard layout that's derived from a typewriter, but got abandoned very early on in PCs, even though Polish has 9 additional characters.

because Poles had to smuggle computers in, the supply was coming from USA, and then it was too late.

Every single keyboard layout has its own story. Let me tell you the one about the keyboard layout I use: CAN/CSA Z243.200-92.

When writing French on typewriters, people in Québec and the rest of Canada used a slightly modified US-keyboard layout that assigned the necessary accents and moved the symbols those keys used elsewhere. You could even use this layout with the US 104-keys keyboards on computers without losing much. Aside from having glyphs on your keys that didn't connect to what you were typing but people lived with it.

But when we moved to computers there came an opportunity to improve the keyboard. We could now assign keys to common letters with their accents together without losing anything, since we didn't need to focus on the additive nature of accents. You know, moving from a mechanical system to pure software.

So who jumped on the opportunity? The government of Québec led the charge in the early 90s for this new keyboard layout to replace the old French (Canada) layout. Feeling at some point that there was a risk of furthering divide in Canada, the federal government asked for some slight changes to the Québec proposal, in exchange for the promise of adopting it as the standard Canada-wide. Québec agreed, but Canada never did anything of value to help with adoption. So we're stuck with two standards, basically on the line of your OS: if you're on Windows, you're probably using the old French (Canada), and Mac users switched over to the new standard.

Every. single. keyboard layout. has a story surrounding its creation and its usage.

Not sure I buy that explanation -- an image search suggests that a lot of US-made typewriters didn't have curly, square, or angle braces, and yet we have them on the standard US keyboard layout.

No {} either, and | uses different keys.

Apple specifically don't label these special characters on their keyboards for some reason, but they aren't inaccessible, you just need to press option/alt. If you use the keyboard layout viewer built-in to macOS, you'll discover there's actually extra letters and symbols on every key!

Thank you, that's most helpful!

Because the designers of Unix used whatever keys happened to be available on the teletype keyboards that they had in their lab, and didn’t give a second thought to international keyboard layouts.

Programming languages used to be more cognizant of this. For example Pascal used mostly keywords rather than ASCII symbols, and this was entirely intentional to enable programmers in all countries to easily work in the language.

Of course C inherited Unix’s approach, killed Pascal, and nobody cares anymore. Except all those millions of non-English users trying to learn programming, but nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about them.

Not to be snarky, but which popular programming languages have come out of Silicon Valley? I can think of Swift and perhaps Java (Sun)?

Java did try to be C as much as possible, as language/syntax principles it's pretty much just C.

Java, JavaScript. Those two adopted the C syntax and cemented it as the baseline for everything that followed.

Still in the 1990s, Microsoft had a focus on BASIC which had a keyword-centric syntax. But Java and the web killed that.

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