[HN Gopher] A visual comparison of different national layouts on...
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A visual comparison of different national layouts on a computer
keyboard (2019)
Author : AgrMohit
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-10-01 11:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.farah.cl)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.farah.cl)
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > This used to be the standard keyboard layout in the
| Netherlands, but at some point (seemingly, during the late '90s),
| it was abandoned in favor of the English (US international)
| layout, laid on top of ISO keyboards (although ANSI units are a
| common sight and ANSISO models can be spotted every now and
| then). Worse, the keyboards commonly sold in that country print
| the legends for the regular English (USA) layout, with the only
| addition of the euro sign (EUR) on the bottom-right corner of the
| 5 % keycap. Why aren't the rest of the tertiary (AltGr) and
| quaternary (AltGr-Shift) layer assignments printed is a mystery,
| but cost-saving and laziness are quite probably to blame.
|
| I assume it's because:
|
| 1) those symbols are rarely used in the Dutch language, so
| there's no need to label them
|
| 2) pre-euro keyboards were presumably simply US keyboards (IIRC
| guilders were simply denoted by 'fl.'). With the introduction of
| the euro, there came a need to type its associated symbol, which
| then led to the EUR symbol being printed on the 5 key (and AltGr
| being printed on the right Alt key).
| jagrsw wrote:
| Quick nitpick on Polish keyboard layouts. The "Polish (standard)"
| is more often referred to as the "typist" layout in Poland. IBM's
| docs say this is required for government contracts. I haven't
| seen it in any dev or home environments, but it wouldn't surprise
| me if some compliance-focused IT departments in the government
| enforce it.
|
| <Note the duplicated entries for two of the diacritics that are
| used in Polish.> - did the author conflate z with z? A rookie
| mistake! :)
|
| I'm running the 'pl' layout on my Linux box. The Alt(Gr) layer
| outputs the following:
| [?]23C/EUR1/2SS*<<>>-sdaeNG'@...lzc,,"nu<=>=. Some are expected
| (diacritics, EUR), but the presence of characters like C/, d, ae,
| NG, and @ is somewhat baffling, I wonder what's the history here.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Converting from vertical Enter to horizontal Enter when moving to
| the USA was a real frustration. I spent the first 4 years just
| importing British keyboards.
| jayrobin wrote:
| I miss my chunky Enter key! Also whenever I have to write a
| currency value in PS I'm always annoyed that I need to go to
| the Wikipedia entry for "Pound sign" and copy it from there.
| There's probably an easier way, but it comes up so infrequently
| and I'm far too lazy to learn.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Are you me? LOL
|
| There is an ALT+ for it, but I can never remember it, despite
| needing it at least once a week.
| frou_dh wrote:
| I came to the opposite conclusion and started importing US
| keyboards into the UK. I figured the UK layout I was used to
| wasn't different enough to justify existing, and the US layout
| has primacy because it's effectively the reference layout for
| programming language syntax design.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes and the missing key is frustrating too. Trying to find |
| and ` and \ on a laptop that doesn't have all the keys is so
| painful I just add the US keyboard layout to my menu bar.
| c-fe wrote:
| 1. The author mentions that the french (belgian) layout is more
| popular in luxembourg that the swiss (french) layout.
| Anecdotally, I can not agree with this. As a luxembourgish
| person, encountering many keyboards in schools, offices, through
| laptops i bought etc, the swiss (french) layout is by far the
| most common. I have never seen an Azerty used in practice except
| by french people. The second most common seems to be German
| Qwertz, that could also be because there is no amazon.lu but
| instead most people i know order through amazon.de which of
| course mostly shows german keyboards so its easy to buy it on
| accident.
|
| 2. I once did an exchange semester of university in France, where
| i was forced to use their computers for programming. Not only did
| I start 2 weeks after the other students due to timing issues
| with my primary university, but then I also had some very
| stressful weeks learning to program on azerty keyboards. It was
| very painful at first and i nearly went back to two-finger
| typing, but in the end after 5 months i became more fluent than i
| expected on azerty.
|
| 3. 3 years ago (i was around 24 years old) I decided to switch
| from my layout i used until then (ISO, swiss french) to the Ansi
| Us layout, and I am happy i did the switch. It is so much better
| for programming, especially wrt to [] {} (). And I even prefer
| typing diacritics by using US international. I write fluently in
| french and german with this and I like it. The main pain point
| was switching from vertical to horizontal enter, I typed \ for
| months...
| ejolto wrote:
| You can use US international layout on an ISO keyboard, then
| you get is access to all the types of parenthesis while keeping
| the vertical enter. That's what I do, it doesn't matter what
| lettes are on the key caps.
| c-fe wrote:
| I was aware of this, but I chose to go to Ansi since it
| seemed that lots of gaming and special ergonomic keyboards
| used Ansi and i may be curious in the future to try them
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > As a luxembourgish person, encountering many keyboards in
| schools, offices, through laptops i bought etc, the swiss
| (french) layout is by far the most common. I have never seen an
| Azerty used in practice except by french people.
|
| I won't disagree with that but, living in Luxembourg, I head to
| the closest supermarket, a "Cora" also selling keyboards, mice,
| USB sticks, etc. and I can buy an AZERTY layout if I want to
| (they've got both QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards).
|
| That said, just like you: I type using a QWERTY layout.
| c-fe wrote:
| Yeah good point, I also checked hifi.lu and saturn.lu and in
| both cases azerty seems to be top suggested choice. Its just
| weird to me, because I have never encountered azerty in the
| wild in luxembourg. All family, friends (all but one),
| colleagues, .. use the swiss layout. And I also know that
| default choice at university of luxembourg and the government
| is swiss french...
| fowlie wrote:
| This is really stupid, old, legacy sh*t. If the USB
| HumanInoutDevice spec would support full unicode, keyboards could
| just send unicode directly and not rely on a not-known-by-the-
| keyboard-firmware language setting. The language settings would
| be implemented in the keyboard firmware, but with todays hardware
| shouldn't be a problem.
|
| Edit: typos
| jagrsw wrote:
| While I get the sentiment, implementing full Unicode support
| directly in the keyboard firmware would pose challenges.
| Consider mechanical keyboards where keys are swappable; you'd
| need a mechanism to inform the firmware of the current
| configuration, either through dip switches or a separate
| firmware tool. It's not as straightforward as it might seem.
| treyd wrote:
| That and also it wouldn't be able to express modifier key
| state, locks, etc, so it would have to coexist with the
| existing scancode-based input methods.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| If you represent Unicode codepoints as unsigned 32-bit
| integers, you have the eleven high bits free for
| representing modifier keys. You can even represent changes
| of state for the modifier keys without a normal key press
| by sending the modifier bits with a NUL character.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Some very lengthy pages on the subject of keyboards, no mention
| of ISO/IEC 9995-1 anywhere, nor any mention of "104-key",
| "105-key", "109-key" et al. in favour of some very confusing and
| idiosyncratic "ANSI", "ANSISO", "ISANSI" nomenclature instead,
| which the site proceeds to explain is confusing, wrong, and a
| popular (at least in the United States, the site says)
| misconception.
|
| If it is confusing and wrong, it's a bad idea to base all of the
| other explanations on that terminology, because it just
| reinforces something that should not be reinforced. Yes,
| "109-key" can be off by as much as 20 keys; but it avoids
| implying the whole "ISO versus ANSI" nonsense, and making up
| things like "ISANSI" from whole cloth; and at least does imply
| that the important difference from "104-key" is 5 extra physical
| keys in various places.
| zokier wrote:
| Keyboard layouts are such a pet peeve of mine on so many layers.
| Using custom keyboards and/or layouts is a pain because there is
| no standard way of defining layout and furthermore most systems
| do not support arbitrary layers/modifiers/layouts which are
| critical for reduced key count keyboards. The standard national
| layouts often being poor fit for technical use only makes the
| situation more annoying.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The standard national layouts often being poor fit for
| technical use only makes the situation more annoying.
|
| Definitely!
|
| And the absolute biggest pain with _physical_ keyboard layouts
| is that if you use anything not standard then you 're sorry out
| of luck when you buy a laptop (until your carry your external
| keyboard with you in addition to your laptop).
|
| Even buying a common laptop with a US ANSI physical layout
| (wide enter key, not tall) is not trivial in Europe. It's
| doable but it requires some research/planning.
| grumblingdev wrote:
| The biggest issue for Mac users is the placement of the `command`
| key on the US ANSI keyboards - which is the layout for pretty
| much all mechanical keyboards. And the missing left `fn` key.
|
| It requires you to curl your thumb awkwardly when resting on the
| home row or WASD.
|
| It is between the Z and X, but on MacBook keyboard it is directly
| under the X so your thumb can rest straight.
|
| The only keyboard I have found that has a similar MacBook layout
| is the Niz Plum Micro84[1] with dome switches.
|
| There was also the discontinued NuPhy F1 that had a fn key but
| still had a terrible command placement.
|
| I don't know why more Mac users don't complain about this.
|
| [1]: https://epomaker.com/products/niz-plum-84-bluetooth [2]:
| https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/nutype-f1
| c-fe wrote:
| One solution to this problem is to remap caps lock to cmd,
| which can be easily done in the settings.
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(page generated 2023-10-02 23:01 UTC)