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Comment by markeganfuller | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking at my English keyboard and it has Alt Gr...

Qwerty keyboards intended specifically for the US market (opposed to the UK for instance) frequently do not have AltGr keys. The thinkpad I'm using right now doesn't have one, and the Das Professional I have next to me doesn't have it either. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever owned a keyboard with an AltGr key..

To get around this, I have taken to using xmodmap to turn my right alt key into altgr.

I'm surprised to learn that the Das doesn't have it.

How would you tell…?

Ha. Only the Das Ultimate doesn't have printed keys. I got the Professional which has printed keys (http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional/). I'm not that show-offy about touch-typing. ;)

Tip: I've got both, the blank one isn't worth the hassle. I can type fine on it, except when I need to find & or something. Then I have to press all the numeric keys to figure it out.

Here in Belgium we have to AltGr-the hell out of our keyboard during development. These characters can only be entered using the AltGr key on a Belgian Azerty keyboard (be-latin1): '|' '@' '#' '^' '{' '}' '[' ']' '\' and '~' Its not realy a problem, as long as you're used to it :-)

Of those, |, @, #, ^, {, } and ~ are all keys that you need shift for on US Qwerty keyboards, so I imagine that the typing experience for those is relatively comparable.

IF those characters are actually displayed on the corresponding keys. If it's like the # on the Mac keyboard - not displayed anywhere - it's a right pain to learn in the first place without any visual cues.

I'm looking at a couple Macs sitting around the house and they all have a pretty obvious # right above the 3. Perhaps you mean some other key?

(I do really miss the days when Mac keyboards had the weird symbol they use for "alt" in menus on the key.)

Which keyboard do you have? The standard aluminium full size one doesn't label it, at least in the uk

On US Mac keyboards, # is Shift-3. On UK Mac keyboards Shift-3 is the Pound (Sterling) sign. # becomes Alt-3 and is unlabelled on the keyboard.

In the past, I've bought US Mac keyboards just for the #, or switched the keyboard layout in software to US.

I've become used to the alt-3 combo now, but it took a long time. I type # a lot more than I ever type £. $, too.

All my machines have US keyboards.

I fixed my keyboard -- @,#,^,{,}.... no shift by default. Have to press shift to get 2,3,6,[,],9,0,...

Must be annoying to have to press shift to get those symbol chars while you're coding, eh?

> Must be annoying to have to press shift to get those symbol chars while you're coding, eh?

Honestly no. It's all muscle memory for me, I don't think about it any more than I think about typing capital letters.

I think it's french keyboards that are like that by default. Symbols are the default and you have to press the Shift-key to get numbers.

Yeah, and some people complain that they have to use shift to get numbers.

I just think people will criticise their local layout no matter what. I use both a French AZERTY and a Québec QWERTY everyday (at work/home) and I think they are simply equally good for both typing French and for coding. The Québec keyboard (maybe actually Canadian multilingual or something) might have an edge because it more easily allows typing accented letters in uppercase, but on the other hand it doesn't let me type the € sign, so...

So most Belgian developers are not switching layouts when coding? I thought most of us non-US developers are "bi-lingual" when it comes to keyboard layouts.

That's nothing. Standard Italian layout lacks tilde and backtick completely… and one needs three fingers to type “{” or “}”. I use only US layout for programming.

Actually, I switch between three layouts on my machine (the third one is for my mother tongue), and I also use AltGr for typographic characters.

Living in the US, I've never heard of an AltGr key until this discussion.

Living in the UK, I've always seen it and for some reason never questioned what the Gr meant!

so.. what does it mean?

According to wikipedia:

The meaning of the key's abbreviation is not explicitly given in many IBM PC compatible technical reference manuals. However, IBM states that AltGr is an abbreviation for alternate graphic, and Sun keyboards label the key as Alt Graph.

Apparently, AltGr was originally introduced as a means to produce box-drawing characters, also known as pseudographics, in text user interfaces. These characters are, however, much less useful in graphical user interfaces, and rather than alternate graphic the key is today used to produce alternate graphemes.

I'm from Croatia, and we have the AltGr key.

However, I discovered that Alt + Control = AltGr when I needed to use it at work[1], so it's simply a shortcut, I think.

[1]: We have (I recently switched to an UK keyboard, because it suits me better) keyboards at work, because the Croatian (all slavic languages, to be honest) is horrendously counterproductive for programming. Google the layout, and you'll realise why. An example: You need to press AltGr+B for `{` (if I remember correctly).

Perhaps, but I think it still goes against the original intent. Ctrl-~ or Ctrl-^ should give you a record separator (RS) and Ctrl-Del or Ctrl-_ should give you a unit separator (US). For the same reason Ctrl-m or Ctrl-M should give you carriage return (CR). This is because ASCII values from 00-1F are control characters and effectively grounded the most significant bits 7 and 6. Shift similarly would toggle or ground bit 6, depending on the implementation.

What happened was that the Ctrl key became synonymous with "command" after Teletype, so it became more about doing something. Think about Ctrl-x, Ctrl-c, and Ctrl-v as an example, but you still see some relics like Ctrl-d as End of Transmission (EOT) to close a shell or terminal. Alt is like a shift, but it is actually closer to the Fn key on most laptop keyboards. It was an alternative function of that particular key, so where the shift key provided you with an alternate case, Alt was more akin to an entirely different key... it isn't Alt plus an 'a' key, it is Alt-a.

AltGr was like another Alt key. It was originally there to allow you to enter an alternate glyph, especially line drawing characters available in extended ASCII, B0-DF. I thought it was a mapping closer to flipping the most significant bit to 1, but it doesn't exactly overlay the lower ASCII range, so that might be another change that evolved on the way to the modern keyboard.

To your original point, Microsoft Windows will now usually treat the chord Ctrl-Alt as AltGr. I don't know if that is with all layouts, or just those keyboards that lack AltGr. I find that most Linux distributions tend to follow Microsoft's lead and provide similar mappings but now they even repurposed the Win key as Meta or sometimes called Super. So it is likely that Ctrl-Alt is commonly the equivalent of AltGr.

For the propose of this discussion, I think it'd be better if Ctrl could be used to type these text separators, but the way modern operating systems map their modern keyboards, it might be difficult to ever reach consensus on how this should be done.

This hasn't been true since IBM keyboards became popular. For example, on older keyboards shift+number would simply toggle a bit, so shift+2 would be a double quote, etc., but this hasn't been common for decades now. Unfortunately.

Probably on the path to scan codes. By using scan codes, they could abstract what a particular key meant and thereby remap the keys so that they didn't have to match the ASCII table layout. I still don't understand why we evolved scan codes the way we did. This requires the OS to be in sync to be able to map them back.

I'm a Spanish living in UK and I love using UK keyboards for the same reason: the layout is way better for programming!

Windows used to have a "Czech (Programmers)" keyboard layout. As I remember, it was one of the few layouts that _just worked_. First thing I would do on new installs is make it the only available layout.

Almost nobody calls it AltGr, it's just the goddamn "right Alt key" :) ...and yes, it has a different key code from the left one, even if in most software it works just like another Alt.

The clever thing is how some international keyboard layouts use it like some kind of "second shift" for typing character with accents/decorations: like AltGr+a => "ă", AltGr+q => "â", AltGr+s => "ș" etc. ...but not even these keyboard layouts are popular, and usually marked as "alternative" or "programmers' layout for language XYZ", because people are stupid and refuse to learn how to use this and prefer instead a funky layout national language keyboard instead of an US English keyboard with an AltGr that would just solve 99% of special characters problems.

If all the keyboards in the world would just be US English Standard keyboards with an AltGr (most US English keyboards I've seen do have an AltGr!), all latin-alphabet languages with special characters would be easy to type, we polyglots could easily use the same keyboard for typing in multiple languages without having to remember what keys' positions have radically changed on each layout... but people are stupid and refuse to learn even simple key combinations.

Oh, and somebody should shoot the British (and French) for adding that annoying extra key to the right of the left Shift that I always have to disable (and making the Shift much smaller), and for creating extra confusion by branding them as "british international" or "us english business" keyboards.

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