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)?
You're on /c/programming.
Also, it's even ISO standardized, so yeah, it's an international norm.
Pragmatically: most programming languages are developed in a way to that it's easy to type them up on a standard us layout. As English only has 26 letters, which is less than any other language using the latin alphabet (don't even start me on languages with accents like ñ or that differentiate between à, a, á, and â), all the special characters are usually easily accessible. Most others layouts will tuck them away behind non-trivial combinations in favor of improving accessibility of extra letters and special characters. Cuz essentially in human language you barely need
*and[. So, I guess, right ctrl + left shift + 9 will do? how do you feel about coding in python on that. Or on a keyboard where the space for your|has been allocated to some letter ø and your OR operator has been moved to the numpad.Not only are there other ones that are also ISO standards when it comes to software layouts, but funny enough, when it comes to physical layouts, US keyboards normally follow an ANSI standard (not an ISO one), whereas many non-US keyboards typically follow a physical key layout known as "ISO Keyboard", so one could argue those are more of an "ISO" standard.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Physical_keyboard_layouts_comparison_ANSI_ISO_KS_ABNT_JIS.png
No keyboard layout uses ctrl like that..... in fact, I don't think you ever really need to press more than one modifier in any standard non-US keyboard. Unless you have a very advanced custom layout with fancy extra glyphs... but definitelly not for the typical programming symbols.
ISO keyboards actually have one more key and one more modifier ("AltGr", which is different from "Alt") than the ANSI keyboards.
In fact, depending on the symbol it might be easier in some cases. No need to press "shift" or anything for a
#or a+in a German QWERTZ keyboard, unlike in the US one. Though of course for some other ones (like=or\) you might need to press 1 modifier.. but never more than 1, so it isn't any harder than doing a)or a_in the US layout.Remind me again, how do you get
{}or[]on that layout?Same effort as getting
&*and()on a US layout (so, modifier key + 7 8 9 0, respectively), the difference is you press AltGr instead of Shift as the modifier. And i'd argue its actually easier to press AltGr with the thumb than shift with the pinky.