When I moved to Europe, companies starting giving me EU (In my case either danish or icelandic) laptops, and I can barely function without plugging in my US keyboard. I've found it so much easier just to learn key sequences to input the few special characters and stick to what I'm otherwise used to for the last 30 years I've been typing.
I know some of it is just that - what you're used to - but I have several native colleagues that have switched to US layouts for coding as well.
As for small keyboards, that's the old man in me I guess. At some point in my youth either with Turbo Pascal or word perfect, I got used to Ctrl-Insert to copy, Shift-delete to cut, Shift-Insert to paste. Not only that Home/End/Page up/Page down are some of my most commonly used keys writing code. Number pads are nice but I would take a serious hit without my nav keys.
I'm German and have never set foot in the US - but I've always used US layout keyboards for coding since I first discovered how much programming language syntax is tied to US keyboard layouts (because most modern widespread languages were invented in the US I guess, quotation needed).
The main reason is the easy access to brackets, slashes, quotation marks, etc. compared to non-US keyboards where most of those are only accessible via key combinations, and really awkward ones as well.
I believe in this so much that I automatically assume any German software developer not wanting to use a US layout keyboard for his daily work is not working efficiently or not deep enough into it.
> I believe in this so much that I automatically assume any German software developer not wanting to use a US layout keyboard for his daily work is not working efficiently or not deep enough into it.
Is that fair? I’m not a German but from another N. European country. I have made my own keyboard config which I use for everything. But I also have a keybind to switch to a normal (or our own local layout) when somebody else is about to use my computer. So if I don’t forget to use it it would seem like I just use the regular keyboard layout.
My own config evolved like this: first I had two layouts for my own language and English/programming, respectively. But switching layouts became a pain in the neck in my latest local job where we chat in our own language, code in English, of course chat in English with our foreign consultants... so I had to make my keyboard config work with all three (native lang/English/programming). I’ve never tried to get used to the US layout but I would have to use the same layout switching approach since the US layout (even the international one) wouldn’t work well enough with my native language.
Can’t say that I appreciate this kind of judgement. What do you know about people’s personal setups? Well, unless they out of resentment just decide to explain like I just did. :)
Same here, never lived in the US, always preferred the US keyboard layout. Fortunately, here in the Netherlands the majority of keyboards are US layout by default. Biggest exceptions in my experience are
- ThinkPads, which seem to divided between US and UK layout here
- Apple, which supplies the ISO layout (shortened left-shift, thin vertical Enter) by default, but thankfully has started to offer US as an option on their web store since a few years
- Logitech which only sells ISO layouts in Europe, and all US layout seem to come from private import
I think for C programming non US keyboards are bad. When starting on such a board, I was thinking who ever thought that typing { is simpler than 'begin' must have been delusional.
Vim's normal mode keybindings all correspond to a function/command of the same name.
For example, i enters insert mode, dd deletes a line, f moves forward a char, etc.
You can record a macro by pressing q followed by another key, followed by any string of keystrokes, and ended by pressing q again.
So qbxxxq would save a macro to the b register that deletes three characters. You play it back with @b.
The neat thing is that macros are recorded in plain text, so pressing "bp would print the contents of the b register (xxx).
You can even write out the keystrokes of a new macro, then yank (copy) that text into a register with y"b (for the b register), and pay it back like normal (by pressing @b).
Anyway, the trouble with this ingenious system is that x isn't just the delete key, it's the delete function. You can map another key to do the x function; but at the end of the day, there's no getting away from the original function names, and therefore no way to get away from the original keybindings.
I've tried remapping keys in vim, and I always end up with an unusable mess, because I have to remap every key or lose access to functionality, and remapping some functions isn't as easy as you might expect.
I would rather, as a user, start from the ground up and define my own normal mode bindings, with regular function names like delete-char() or whatever.
US layout is definitely better than most EU layouts. It is still terrible compared to a custom setup however. So many bad contortions the fingers have to do compared to just having a sensible symbol-layer.
I'm in the Netherlands and I've rarely see a developer use anything other than US ANSI layout on a laptop. Consumer level stuff often defaults to US ANSI, but there is a bit of US/english ISO layout going around too.
A Dutch keyboard layout is a thing, but I've never seen one, just heard of some writers/editors using it.
I'm French and I take my US layout keyboard everywhere I think I might type. All software engineering tooling is just meant for it. It's a harsh lesson I've learned through the torture of using Emacs with a French layout.
I know some of it is just that - what you're used to - but I have several native colleagues that have switched to US layouts for coding as well.
As for small keyboards, that's the old man in me I guess. At some point in my youth either with Turbo Pascal or word perfect, I got used to Ctrl-Insert to copy, Shift-delete to cut, Shift-Insert to paste. Not only that Home/End/Page up/Page down are some of my most commonly used keys writing code. Number pads are nice but I would take a serious hit without my nav keys.