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Do any of you program on non-US keyboard layouts? (upload.wikimedia.org)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by namingthingsiseasy to c/programming

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I've used a US-QWERTY keyboard layout my entire life. I've seen other layouts that do things like reduce the size of the enter/backspace keys, move the pipe operator (|) and can't wrap my head around how I would code on those.

What are your experiences? Are there any layouts that you prefer for coding over US English? Are there any symbols that you have a hard time reaching ($ for example)?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I believe most people in Europe use a localized ISO layout. I used ISO for most my life but in my personal opinion ANSI is way better for software development. I just don't see myself ever going back to ISO.

I wish I was brave enough to try Colemak or Dvorak, tho!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm used to the ISO layout, so whenever I type on an ANSI keyboard I miss the enter key and hit the one above. It's annoyingly hard to find laptops with ISO keyboards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah I forgot that they do this weird ANSI/ISO mix for laptops.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I believe most people in Europe use a localized ISO layout.

Except Romania, where 99% of people use US QWERTY due to a very particular set of circumstances:

Romanian has very few diacritics and it can be 99% understood (in writing) even if you omit them completely. So most of the time people don't bother to use diacritics for digital communication.
After the 1989 Revolution when it rejoined the modern world the Government took about a decade to make up and push standards for the Romanian language in IT (a history of all the fuckups is here if you're curious). Localized ISO layout and Romanian keyboards were eventually created but they never quite took off...
...last but not the least because a simpler layout has become the de facto standard (diacritics on 3rd and 4th level, activated with the right-hand Alt). It's simple, intuitive, easy to learn, and you can use it with any US keyboard.