Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahoge | Hacker News Reader

Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations or escape some characters.

I agree, that should really be fixed in the core.

In the meantime however I recommend using this package https://atom.io/packages/keyboard-localization which has worked really well for me (german keyboard).

I'm running Atom 0.116.0 on Xubuntu and AltGr works perfectly fine. My keyboard layout is Norwegian.

Norwegian with Sámi has a lot of collisions. With the regular Norwegian layout, the only collision should be µ (M + AltGr).

0.116.0? That's an ancient version (or a typo). You should probably upgrade to 1.0.

>Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

Perhaps such keyboards don't concern that many people?

AltGr is used by many layouts such as German, Turkish, French, Polish, and US International.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key

Also, this was supposed to be fixed in 1.0. I don't know why they decided to release 1.0 prematurely.

Yes, I'm from Germany and had the same problem.

LiveScript is a pain with it :\

Today I learned I can type an acute accent ´ without memorizing the "alt code" by using right alt.

Now I can `quote´ in annoying ways or more ‘proper’ ways. This is life changing.

It's also nifty to be able to type ¼ and ½

That's going to render whole countries worth of developers reconsider using Atom. AltGr is widely used at Nordic countries at least and I wouldn't be surprised if elsewhere too.

Let them speak English! This'll bring the world closer together.

We speak English, but our laptops come with localized keyboards.

Can't you just pick a different layout in the OS -- and that will remap the physical buttons?

Of course you can -- but at the same time you ditch tens of years worth of muscle memory and habits. Also the physical buttons don't correspond to the characters anymore, which can be irritating when trying to remember where that one damned seldom-used sigil was again. Also it's a pain in the ass to have to switch constantly between layouts, if you want to write some non-code text in your native language that uses characters that are not present in the US layout. (Btw. for what it's worth, I use customized Dvorak layout that contains all the characters I use when coding, typing English and Finnish. But I'd imagine most of us won't go that far to actually customize their layouts.)

I think having to remap your systems keyboard to something other than your native language in order to use an editor is a bit unreasonable.

Typing accented characters is far easier in Spanish with a Spanish layout, that we all grow up with. The software shouldn't just ignore half the planet on the basis of "use English".

Switching to an American keyboard layout just so programs work isn't very practical. Especially when you have to switch back to your localized layout for correspondence with your non-English speaking peers and colleagues in between.

Personally I even prefer the German layout for programming, though I've met a lot of programmers who prefer the American layout because it requires less chords.

I prefer the Neo layout (which is completely different, think: Dvorak), which has excellent placement of all programming-relevant keys as well as German and English bi- and trigrams. Very comfortable to type, but too many programs capture events that break functions of the keyboard layout. It uses left and right shift, caps lock and ' (# on QWERTZ), the key between shift and Z (that's not there on a US keyboard) as well as AltGr as modifiers (plus combinations of the above). Sublime is particularly bad (captures compose and tab) :\

I used a custom layout with easy access to tons of special characters but gave up on it when I frequently had to switch between different operating systems.

My new laptop has a weird keyboard that seems to be based on the US keyset with the right symbol key replaced with the ISO key you're referring to. In other words: angle brackets are right next to the space bar (left ctrl, symbol key, left alt, space bar, angle brackets, AltGr, Fn, right ctrl). Also the arrow keys are lodged in between that and the numpad. It's odd, but I have gotten used to it.

The only problem is finding an external keyboard with the same layout. I found that switching keyboard layouts is extremely bad for my productivity but I don't want to carry around an external keyboard everywhere I take my laptop.

It's... suboptimal.

I have a ThinkPad Compact USB keyboard at work and a ThinkPad at home (although the external version has a terrible controller/firmware, TrackPoint scrolling is hard in Linux. I've mapped it to right click + TrackPoint because otherwise I'd get spurious paste events when trying to scroll).

The main reason to use this keyboard for me is the trackpoint - my hands never leave the home row (I have arrow keys and a num pad on layer 4, see http://neo-layout.org/ (mouse over the "Ebene 4" button).

This really does make it hard for me to user other machines, you're right about that (although every linux distro ships neo, and for windows there is a no-installation-required autohotkey-based executable). But I'm not using other machines enough to make any compromises there. 99% of the time I'm using my machines, and that's what I've optimised for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com