MacOS way it's only half good if you don't use accents while typing and only need them that one time, while in all languages with accented letters it's the worst and slowest method you can use.
True that. But I typed French on a qwerty for a while on Mac OS, and you « just » alt+e-e to do é or something. You get used to it.
And on iPhones, I never actually hold « e » to show the accents, their system figures out the accents. Although it missed sometimes, it’s pretty good. I can just type « je suis arrivee a la maison » and it accentuâtes my letters properly. Actually, I had to manually remove the accents for this exemple ^^
Édit: ok, that’s kinda funny, it must be because I typed French in English and it messed it up, but « accentuâtes » doesn’t make any sense, same with « édit » it just inferred for my. Leaving the message as is for the lols
I’m typing German on a US keyboard layout and I’m very used to the alt +u-u chord etc to write the Inlauts. I still don’t have a setup on Linux though because I’m used to type this sequence with the left Alt key not the right.
I'm a Portuguese native speaker, and use a US keyboard with the US International layout (the pt keyboard layout is terrible for programming). Having dead keys for Portuguese diacritics is basically essential, but I do occasionally need to type things in other languages where I have no clue how to input the diacritics. The macOS input method makes it possible to input those characters in a predictable, easy to remember way.
Wouldn’t you also change the keyboard layout in that situation? So if you’re typing Spanish, there’s a dedicated key for ñ, but you can also push and hold c to get č, for example.
Changing keyboard layout it's tricky, when I'm writing code I want the most important keys (parenthesis, brackets, braces, semicolon etc) where I'm used to find them, but I often need to write comments in Italian for auto generated documentation.
Constantly switching keyboard layout can be almost as disruptive as waiting for a dropdown to appear.
I use a keyboard shortcut for swapping between the two most recently used layouts. Something like ctrl+space (or something else if I'm using Emacs a lot). Is this disruptive?
The most common scenario is that I'm writing a mixture of English and Japanese, and I can't do that without switching layouts.
If I'm switching keyboard layouts, I'm not programming in both layouts. I'm programming in a variation of the US layout, and writing natural language text in a different layout. I'm sure it is disruptive at first, but I got used to it such a long time ago at this point.
There are also a lot of games that don't work except in the QWERTY layout, so I am always switching if I play a game. I have gotten used to it.
I've only ever figured out how to type accents for foreign languages on Macs. Windows has the ALT+1234 gibberish that you have to memorize. I've been fighting against layouts and IMEs on Linux for at least two decades at this point and there are at least three different ways to set the keyboard layout, each of which affect different applications, and some applications seem to ignore the keyboard layout I set. As a result, I often just kind of give up on typing accented characters except on a Mac.
