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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)?
I can't even wrap my mind around people who use 60% keyboards and use a bunch of extra function keys let alone anything more drastic
ABNT2 here, this layout is necessary due to many brazilian portuguese words containing accents. Plus, having ç as a separate key is great. For coding, the \ | key is left to Z and the : ; key is near the right shift, with brackets and curly braces usually around Enter, while ' " is left to 1. It's very good for programming, I'd say.
I use a sub-40% layout that I love. I wrote all about it here: https://natecox.dev/lets-talk-about-keyboards
As a German I have to admit that the ANSI US layout is the one American standard that's superior to the European ones. That said, I still need some Umlaute and accented letters from time to time, which is why I use the EurKEY layout, which adds all of those keys back and many morek, most of them accessible without having to use a dead key.
On a Mac you can just type regular ANSI vowels and umlauts are added automatically. There must be some way to get that working on other platfroms?
I used to use the Brazilian ABNT-2 layout, it's pretty much just a US layout with accent keys that activate like a second layer for some specific keys to display specific Portuguese language characters such as ç á à â ã é è etc. It's surprisingly ok for programming as it doesn't get in the way because you have special keys to activate the 2nd layer and most of them you need to spread shift + something in order to activate them. I'd say it's a good layout.
I use Coleman DH and symbols have never been an issue because I just put them on another layer 😅
The British want a stupid as fuck they moved the tilde into a weird spot and you're basically can't do it
Used US and JP qwerty, both are fine after a while, but switching can be annoying (mostly I mix up whether " or @ is Shift-2).
The one thing I hate is the fragmentation of the bottom left cluster. I started out on keyboards with Ctrl Fn Super Alt, but now I much prefer Fn Ctrl Alt Super.
Started on US, now using DE for decades. But able to still use us. Slash position is a plus there.
But Swiss, that's the stuff of nightmares! Oh and mac while usable unnecessarily sucks too imo.
If I have to work on an American QUERTY keyboard, I have to look for each and every special character. Because our QWERTZ-keyboard has them in other places to make space for all the interesting characters an American keyboard simply fails to offer.
I'm columnar-ortho now, but for standard it's ISO or bust. You can keep your shitty enter key and your overly long shift key
My os is running with a slightly modified us qwerty, which then is mapped through keyboard firmware to a modified us dvorak.
I use US-QWERTY but with the pipe/backslash key as backspace, and the key where backspace usually is gets turned into two keys, pipe/backslash and grave (yes, there is a keycode for grave (`) by itself).
I use Spanish QWERTY layout and it's... weird for coding.
I'm used to it from my whole life so that's what I use but sometimes brackets or special symbols are weird.
I've always wanted to change to use US-International layout. So I can keep ñ and áéíóú, and also have easy access to coding symbols. But I have never got around it.
Anyhow I still think that whoever designed ISO layouts messed up. We should use US international layout. That's my two cents.
On UK keyboards the £ replaces the $ and $ replaces '
Double quotation marks " are in the same place though so a lot of british programmers don't use single quotation marks because they are hard to press. If your touch typing you have to reach all the way to the bottom right with your right hand little finger and it's just not worth it.
I use US layout for programming because it is way better than SR latin. For documents and mails, I use both variants - latin and cyrillic.
I’m having to use US keyboard layout in Oz and not enjoying the half-height Return key very much.
I'm using a Dygma Raise split keyboard with Dvorak as my main layer. The thumb clusters are great for putting difficult to reach keys in more comfortable positions. Second layer has NumPad, Directionals and Functions. Still trying to decide how to make the best use of my other layers.
