this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
129 points (88.2% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
74 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 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.