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Comment by flux_w42 | Hacker News Reader

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 :-)

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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.

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