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this. i'm on the swiss german keyboard layout. backticks are hard to do as a keyboard shortcut. they barely work as a character (e.g. for markdown formatting) but with a bit of pracitce that _does_ work.

try getting default vim bindings to work on a swiss german keyboard... i eventually gave up.

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I'm in the same boat as you and after 15 years of coding I finally switched to the US layout 3 weeks ago. Got a Wooting 60HE and installed the EuroKey layout and so far I'm super happy about the switch and many default shortcuts make a lot more sense (e.g. no more acrobatics needed for ctrl+b+[ to enter tmux copy mode).

The first few days are a little rough to unlearn all the muscle memory but I found this neat site to practice typing with your own public gists: https://www.codetyper.io/

I've long used the US international layout with Alt-Graph deadkeys. (For the full experience, you can perhaps buy an ANSI format keyboard from the Netherlands?)

It takes some practice getting AltGr+y as ü and AltGr+w as ä and AltGr+p as ö into your muscle memory, let alone AltGr+circumflex instead of just circumflex to get the dead key (raison d'être requires AltGr+Shift+6 to type properly), but I've found it's otherwise a remarkably workable tradeoff.

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