QWERTY is maybe more efficient (for english), but it is not as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately more efficient keyboard layouts are hard to establish.
It isn't so hard to establish. Colemak and its variants are clearly among the most efficient out there, and there are plenty of metrics one can use to judge, such as finger travel distance, alternating distribution of right and left hand use, and concentration of the most commonly used characters on the home row.
The problem is mainly that it isn't default, which can make it annoying unless you don't mind buying native colemak keyboards.
Changing your caps lock key to a backspace provides most of the finger travel benefits of colemak with much less annoyance.
While its not default you can get it very easily on Linux and its ready on OSX, just need to pick it. No idea about Windows. For pair programming I use keyboard with hardware Colemak, my pp partner can use whatever that way ;)
Yes, but now what happens when you need to use someone else's computer? It just makes life a little bit more annoying. De facto standards tend to be very important, so much so that the optimality of that standard is less important than the existence of a standard.
I happen to use colemak, but I recognize it was not a rational decision.
Perhaps I was not clean enough. When I use sb else computer for a longer time I bring my hardware Colemack keyboard with me. If its just a minute or two, I use my now lame touch typing qwerty skills, I'm much slower then Colemack but still faster then most of 'normal' people.
You can be bi-keyboardial. On my home computer I use a modified version of swedish dvorak (svdvorak). I thought that since svdvorak isn't available anywhere I might as well go full obscure.
I type almost as fast with qwerty, but vastly prefer not having to move my fingers that much.
On a separate note: you don't have to be that smart to modify dvorak to something better. Just switching u and i and d and h brings a lot.
I hope the replacement will be programmer-friendly. I still remap my French keyboards in QWERTY because I never got accustomed to hunt for programming characters on AZERTY keyboards.
I don't know how useful it would be to get programmers and IT pros on-board, in order to help adoption.
> The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.
Yeah, as usual some minister gave money to business owned by a friend or family member for useless study. A french classic. And of course, impossible to know how much this study cost the tax payers ... I don't believe this kind of matter should be a priority of the culture ministry.
AFNOR is France's International Organization for Standardization (ISO) member body. They're also a non-profit.
There is some cronyism in France but I'm not so sure it's the case here.
Too bad most laptops I can find online in Europe are QWERTZ. The only store I found that delivers abroad and has some decent notebooks is amazon.co.uk but I'd prefer something in euro.
Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies.
Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this.
"option - e e = é" "option ` - a = à"... I don't know how to type "oeuf" or "oeil" though.
The US-International layout exists for ages, and allows for composable letters. "áéíóúçãñàâô..." is as simple as getting the accent + letter.
I fail to understand why the Brazilian Standardization bodies decided that we needed to get a keyboard with an exclusive letter for "ç" and yet forces composition of everything else.
This causes excruciating pain when coding, as you can't type a single ', ", or ~ without an obligatory space after it.
Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.
"excruciating pain" is a bit of hyperbole, don't you think?
Quote keys are still in the home row, it is just a matter of muscle memory to get used to "right pinky at home row, thumb at space bar" to get quotes going.
But I am an emacs user, so maybe I just got used to the composability.
After learning touch type on German (QWERTZ) and then on French keyboard (AZERTY) - I finally found a solution by switching to the US International with AltGr Dead Keys (Combinator key) - which is easy on Linux. However on Windows I felt exactly the same pain as you - luckily I have to work only rarely on Windows. Until now I used for Windows [1].
However I do not understand how Microsoft missed to ship such Keyboard layout with Windows.
Now I can write French, German and Turkish on the same keyboard. And when I have to work abroad, even in Russia, the US International layout is everywhere (most of the times reachable just with Alt-Shift on Windows).
I use emacs for input. My browser is xombrero, and with ctrl + i, I can switch to emacs for editing current input. There, I've created an input method with postfix maps, which allows me to input most european languages plus turkish. If I wanted to type « liberté, égalité, fraternité », I'd type:
liberte/, e/galite/, fraternite/
Very easy, and invaluably useful. And I can switch to other input methods like greek, hebrew and arabic, etc.
The last pair of toplevels have to be evaluated one after another, ‘quail-define-rules’ modifies the last created quail package. Stupid, but what can one do…
I use the ‘#’ character to escape the combination, i.e. a# inserts a literally. Otherwise I'd have to use C-g to interrupt a combination, which doesn't work well with macroes, i.e. stops the recording.
When I hit C-i in any input field, a buffer with name like ‘xombreroALP5BY’ pops up in my already running emacs instance, then I edit, and hit ‘C-x #’ to send text to xombrero (technically not so, but works like that).
Oh yeah sure, it's a solution for the current keyboard but I believe a key should already exist for it since it's a common symbol in the language. It would be the equivalent of having to do altgr+S for the dollar symbol in the US.
OS X 10.11 brought the iOS-inspired letter selection, which makes discoverability a bit better, I guess. but as someone who never needs to type those I can't tell if its efficient or not. to type æ you do a long press on a, and either mouse over or push the number beneath the letter. That seems 100x more complicated than typing a normal key, but at least there is no guessing.
what sucks about AZERTY too is that very common strokes require modifiers
- the `.` (point) requires a shift key!
- for `@` you need "alt gr"
- top-row numbers need a shift. especially annoying if the keyboard does not have a number pad
In spanish we also have lots of accents, plus the ñ, and the ç if you write catalan - plus, we open questions and exclamations with ¿ and ¡. I have a generic american layout in my laptop and it's not a problem at all.
Regarding the œ, shouldn't that be a ligature, handled by the font system? Although it should be language-dependant....
Careful. Wars have been fought over this. The letter 'æ' in danish is a proper letter of the alphabet (in the 27th position) whereas the same symbol in French represents 'a' and 'e' joined together. Much fun.
Up until very recently, ch and ll were proper spanish letters, so when looking up on the dictionary, you would find chancla in a separate chapter, after cordón (ch would come after c in the alphabet). Same with llama and loro (ll being after l). They nowadays maintain their own phoneme but have been demoted to irregular pronunciation, from letter without proper symbol.
Unless it's disabled, on recent versions of OS X and iOS, you can also hold down the letter to get a pop-up of variations. Holding down "e" shows me ėęēêèéë variations. At least, on my US English locale, it does.
To those that understand it to mean that AZERTY is dying, it is not. In fact, it is very hard to buy a non-AZERTY laptop in France. It is unlikely to ever go away.
I have opted for a US layout a few years ago, regardless of the OS. And I cannot myself going back to a UK/FR layout. Thanks god I don't speak any other language. :p
Just make them get the spanish QWERTY. It has all possible accents (even for german). The only exceptions for characters would be for words like "soeur", or "oeil".
It is highly optimized for the home row on the german vocabulary. Support for Programming is also very good.
It has 6 different layers
• Lowercase
• Uppercase
• Special Characters (Braces etc.)
• Navigation and Numbers
• Greek Alphabet (same layout as normal Characters, ιαεοσ)
• Mathematical signs Σℕℝ∂
But I rarely use layer 5 and 6.
I think layer 3,4 and 6 could be a good fit for every keyboard layout.
I live in Zurich and have been thinking of switching.. If you don't mind, I have a couple questions:
How did you handle learning it given so many layers? Stickers seem like trouble..
Do you find it better or worse for dealing with use of occasional accents/etc from a 3rd latin language, (i.e. French) than a more traditional compose key route?
Hi, I've been using Neo2 for a couple of years now, so maybe I can help you with these.
Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks.
You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)
It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.
I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.
Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1.
Cool, thanks! I'll do a little practice and then jump in to immersion at the start of my next vacation then. I just tried a little using an onscreen keyboard as a cheat, and it doesn't really feel all that different from learning chorded keyboard.
At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge to far in a work environment.
It takes time. So I started with a typing program (ktouch) and lections for neo2.
There are 6 layers, but you have to consider that uppercase and lowercase is almost the same.
The layers 5 and 6 are not in my usage pattern.
Layer 4 is one of the easiest to learn, because it maps the right hand to the numpad and the left one to arrows like sdfe in computer games. a for pos1 and g for end. So there is some easy logic behind this.
At the end there is just layer 3. The organisation of the braces is that they appear in pairs and are arranged in a pattern.
So in Zurich they do a little bit more french as in germany. So I didn't had to use accents a lot. So I can't say a lot about it. èéâǎȩẽ. These characters are a little bit away from the optimal position. But they do not need a Compose Button. èéâ only needs two button strokes. ǎȩẽ needs the Shift button for the first stroke. But the accents are every time on the same position just on different layers. A little bit difficult to explain. Especially if you have not used accents before.
What I would suggest is to take neo2 as a basic layout, take the good parts and addapt it to the usage pattern of the french language.
very cool, thanks! Composing the other accents actually works well for me since I use them infrequently but just frequently enough to get annoyed if there is no system in their placement.
I use neo and find QWERTZ annoying to type on other people's computers. I still use it on my phone though, that's a completely different kind of typing and feels completely separate. Ergonomic layouts also likely wouldn't work well with swipe typing, half the words would be dashing left and right on the home row ;)
Other people's computers are easy if they run Linux (setxkbmap de neo) and okay if they run Windows (there's a no-install no-admin tool to remap), but you can't switch a Mac temporarily without installing the keyboard layout and even then getting the layers to work is awful. So I'd say you're half-right about that.
I have no issue with the shortcuts, it takes a while to learn them anew but they're no less convenient because of it. I started using Emacs years after Neo and I have no complaints about the keymappings, so it really can't be that bad ;)
In my experience, still having azerty on the phone is not too inconvenient: while I type blind on the Bépo, I stay visual with Azerty. This is enough of a difference that I don't confuse the two.
Just to add, while Neo is optimized for German text it also works very well with English (better than QWERTY/QWERTZ at any rate). These days I type more English text than German and it's no problem at all. Though it probably wouldn't be a native English speaker's first choice.
I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts. I am Norwegian and a software developer. I hate Norwegian keyboard layout. It makes programming so much more awkward because the {}, [] and ; symbols used a lot in programming are not easily accessible.
There is also a kind of tyranny in how computer companies deal with language. It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway. Also Apple, and I pretty sure MS does the same treat language as a totally binary thing. Like either you write only english or only german, norwegian, french or whatever.
For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.
> It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway.
I'm surprised. Each time I ordered a laptop on the Apple Store, there was the option to choose the keyboard layout.
> For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.
(Sorry to contradict you :)) But again, I found Mac OS to be very good at guessing the language I'm using in a text input field. I could type French now and it would be able to correct it! maybe it's not as polished for Norvergian.
The only think I miss is the ability to lookup the definition of a French or Spanish word. By default, it only looks up english definitions when you click on words (if somebody knows how to achieve this, i'm interested!).
> I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts.
Actually, I'm pretty fine with the AZERTY keyboard, even for programming. What I dislike is that I have to use both. My computer have qwerty keyboards, but sometimes I have to use French keyboard on other people's computers...
Maybe they meant in store? A friend of mine was studying in Denmark and his Macbook broke. He mentioned how hard it was to get a replacement with an American keyboard, so it seems to be a common problem.
> The only think I miss is the ability to lookup the definition of a French or Spanish word. By default, it only looks up english definitions when you click on words (if somebody knows how to achieve this, i'm interested!).
This exactly my problem as a Canadian. I sometimes write in French but often in English. The spell checker drive me mad . It's bad enough that american english is the default or only option in a lot of cases. C++ with Canada multilingual keyboard because of the {} placement. I got used to it but not the easiest to stretch. Luckily I read more code than type.
That isn't how keyboards work. If a key is assigned to a different keyboard code, then when you push the button the OS will recognise that code regardless of layout configuration.
Norwegian keyboards have a different physical layout meaning different character codes are sent for the same location.
I suppose you could use something like autohotkey to do that, but it would require intercepting and generating new key presses for every altered key on the keyboard, and could theoretically cause input-swaps if one keypress took longer than a subsequent keypress (e.g. due to a context switch).
While as a coder I'm sympathetic, it still seems bizarre to me that []{} are dedicated keys when the vast majority of typists will almost never in their lives use them. I mean at least make it ()!!
It sucks that `~[]{} are so well hidden on Scandinavian keyboards (did people not program when these where made?), but what the hell are you on about with Apple?
They do sell Macs with American keyboards in Norway (including laptops! no additional fee) and they have very easy software keyboard layout switching. I have 5 layouts on my OSX, and at least as many on my iPhone.
Absolutly agree, i spent months and months working on a contract in italy, writting c/c++ on keyboards without { or }
. The only way to get it on the italian layout seemed to be to use A-123 and A-125, it drove me nuts. Eventualy i had to bring my own keyboard from the UK. because the bits of paper glued to the keys kept falling off.
>Most people think that ignoring an accent on a capital letter is acceptable
Of course it is! In Poland its perfectly reasonable to ignore all "weird" polish characters. Ą ą Ć ć Ę ę Ł ł Ń ń Ó ó Ś ś Ź ź Ż ż? hell no. I started using computers in ~90, never ever in my life configured local keyboard variant.
>commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer
brilliant, nothing like one more standard to ignore!
offtopic: BBC Video volume slider goes to 11 (haha), but is too quiet even at full volume :(. BBC should have people/systems responsible for this type of stuff, its not rocket science to normalize volume :/. You can always lower volume on the client if its too loud, but there are no easy ways of making very quiet stuff louder (other than passing it thru sound editor).
I've dropped AZERTY more than 10 years ago. Nowadays I use QWERTY with "US, international with dead keys" as keyboard layout. It works much better than AZERTY. You don't need to remember where all the accented letters are on the keyboard. You just compose them logically with the `'", characters. It pretty much allows for composing any French (accent) German (umlaut) diacritical. The only difficulty is typing a ç. You need to switch on the third level, assign it to a dead key (such as ALT) and then you can compose it as alt+C. The "third level" does not work out-of-the-box.
And once again, the "standard to rule them all" dream * insert relevant xkcd strip here * , finding a keyboard layout that would allow easy typing in French and all France's languages (Breton, Basque, etc) and dialects (Catalan, Provençal, etc). Impossible task to bring both easy typing and support for all of those.
It seems to me that it's a problem (or bunch of problems) that already has a solution(s). I'm right now using a QWERTY layout under Linux. I can code and type English directly, use the compose key to type in French, German and Breton and use a keyboard input (currently fcitx) to type in Chinese. Add to this the fact that you can easily input complex signs that you wouldn't find on keyboards like µ or €. And all this is actually pretty easy to use. I'm sure there are equivalents in Microsoft and MacOS. Why look further?
81 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThe problem is mainly that it isn't default, which can make it annoying unless you don't mind buying native colemak keyboards.
Changing your caps lock key to a backspace provides most of the finger travel benefits of colemak with much less annoyance.
I happen to use colemak, but I recognize it was not a rational decision.
I type almost as fast with qwerty, but vastly prefer not having to move my fingers that much.
On a separate note: you don't have to be that smart to modify dvorak to something better. Just switching u and i and d and h brings a lot.
I don't know how useful it would be to get programmers and IT pros on-board, in order to help adoption.
http://ccm.net/faq/32759-bepo-a-keyboard-layout-optimized-fo... says it is optimized for "typing French and programming languages".
Looking at the layout, it seems all programming punctuation is accessible via either Shift or AltGr, so only one modifier. http://static.commentcamarche.net/www.commentcamarche.net/pi...
Yeah, as usual some minister gave money to business owned by a friend or family member for useless study. A french classic. And of course, impossible to know how much this study cost the tax payers ... I don't believe this kind of matter should be a priority of the culture ministry.
Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this.
"option - e e = é" "option ` - a = à"... I don't know how to type "oeuf" or "oeil" though.
I fail to understand why the Brazilian Standardization bodies decided that we needed to get a keyboard with an exclusive letter for "ç" and yet forces composition of everything else.
Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.
The Mac keyboard is also bearable.
Quote keys are still in the home row, it is just a matter of muscle memory to get used to "right pinky at home row, thumb at space bar" to get quotes going.
But I am an emacs user, so maybe I just got used to the composability.
Yeah, and also I guess I shouldn't joke with that. Sorry.
After learning touch type on German (QWERTZ) and then on French keyboard (AZERTY) - I finally found a solution by switching to the US International with AltGr Dead Keys (Combinator key) - which is easy on Linux. However on Windows I felt exactly the same pain as you - luckily I have to work only rarely on Windows. Until now I used for Windows [1].
However I do not understand how Microsoft missed to ship such Keyboard layout with Windows.
Now I can write French, German and Turkish on the same keyboard. And when I have to work abroad, even in Russia, the US International layout is everywhere (most of the times reachable just with Alt-Shift on Windows).
[1]: https://code.google.com/p/usialtgr/
Compose e' = é Compose oe = œ Compose a^ = â Compose e" = ë
I use the ‘#’ character to escape the combination, i.e. a# inserts a literally. Otherwise I'd have to use C-g to interrupt a combination, which doesn't work well with macroes, i.e. stops the recording.
I use a British Q keyboard, so I need this too:
And in ‘~/.xombrero.conf’: When I hit C-i in any input field, a buffer with name like ‘xombreroALP5BY’ pops up in my already running emacs instance, then I edit, and hit ‘C-x #’ to send text to xombrero (technically not so, but works like that).Hope I didn...
what sucks about AZERTY too is that very common strokes require modifiers
- the `.` (point) requires a shift key! - for `@` you need "alt gr" - top-row numbers need a shift. especially annoying if the keyboard does not have a number pad
ugh..
Regarding the œ, shouldn't that be a ligature, handled by the font system? Although it should be language-dependant....
I personally would prefer (and do use) a QWERTY with compose key shortcuts. It is obviously easier to write code, but I find writing French also easier that way. Not only do we get the obvious (compose + ' = é, compose + ^ = ê, compose + ` = è), but we also get common non-keyboard characters (compose + C + o = ©, compose + - + > = →, compose + = + e = €, guess how to do ₤ and ¥).
I have opted for a US layout a few years ago, regardless of the OS. And I cannot myself going back to a UK/FR layout. Thanks god I don't speak any other language. :p
If your operating system supports it, you can bind any key to the compose key, such as the right alt key.
Here's a link to several options to get software support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Software_support.
I just recently switched to the neo2 keyboard layout.
The hardest thing is unlearning quertz (almost like querty)
http://www.neo-layout.org/
It is highly optimized for the home row on the german vocabulary. Support for Programming is also very good.
It has 6 different layers • Lowercase • Uppercase • Special Characters (Braces etc.) • Navigation and Numbers • Greek Alphabet (same layout as normal Characters, ιαεοσ) • Mathematical signs Σℕℝ∂
But I rarely use layer 5 and 6.
I think layer 3,4 and 6 could be a good fit for every keyboard layout.
How did you handle learning it given so many layers? Stickers seem like trouble..
Do you find it better or worse for dealing with use of occasional accents/etc from a 3rd latin language, (i.e. French) than a more traditional compose key route?
Thanks!
Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks.
You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)
It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.
I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.
Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1.
At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge to far in a work environment.
There are 6 layers, but you have to consider that uppercase and lowercase is almost the same. The layers 5 and 6 are not in my usage pattern. Layer 4 is one of the easiest to learn, because it maps the right hand to the numpad and the left one to arrows like sdfe in computer games. a for pos1 and g for end. So there is some easy logic behind this.
At the end there is just layer 3. The organisation of the braces is that they appear in pairs and are arranged in a pattern.
So in Zurich they do a little bit more french as in germany. So I didn't had to use accents a lot. So I can't say a lot about it. èéâǎȩẽ. These characters are a little bit away from the optimal position. But they do not need a Compose Button. èéâ only needs two button strokes. ǎȩẽ needs the Shift button for the first stroke. But the accents are every time on the same position just on different layers. A little bit difficult to explain. Especially if you have not used accents before.
What I would suggest is to take neo2 as a basic layout, take the good parts and addapt it to the usage pattern of the french language.
I tried switching to it, but I couldn't after a few weeks for three reasons:
- I type slower on other's people keyboards when I have to change frequently of layout (I use a Spanish QWERTY layout so it isn't as different);
- My phone doesn't have the layout, so more switching;
- The shortcuts aren't as convenient (Ctrl+c/v/t/etc.).
Other people's computers are easy if they run Linux (setxkbmap de neo) and okay if they run Windows (there's a no-install no-admin tool to remap), but you can't switch a Mac temporarily without installing the keyboard layout and even then getting the layers to work is awful. So I'd say you're half-right about that.
I have no issue with the shortcuts, it takes a while to learn them anew but they're no less convenient because of it. I started using Emacs years after Neo and I have no complaints about the keymappings, so it really can't be that bad ;)
There is also a kind of tyranny in how computer companies deal with language. It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway. Also Apple, and I pretty sure MS does the same treat language as a totally binary thing. Like either you write only english or only german, norwegian, french or whatever.
For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.
I'm surprised. Each time I ordered a laptop on the Apple Store, there was the option to choose the keyboard layout.
> For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.
(Sorry to contradict you :)) But again, I found Mac OS to be very good at guessing the language I'm using in a text input field. I could type French now and it would be able to correct it! maybe it's not as polished for Norvergian.
The only think I miss is the ability to lookup the definition of a French or Spanish word. By default, it only looks up english definitions when you click on words (if somebody knows how to achieve this, i'm interested!).
> I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts.
Actually, I'm pretty fine with the AZERTY keyboard, even for programming. What I dislike is that I have to use both. My computer have qwerty keyboards, but sometimes I have to use French keyboard on other people's computers...
Go to preferences in the Dictionary application.
Norwegian keyboards have a different physical layout meaning different character codes are sent for the same location.
Here's diagrams of the mappings.
https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-mua/test/kbd-...
And here's usbkbd (note scancodes at the top):
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/hid/usbhid/usbk...
Explanation on scancodes, which map to which keys for different physical boards: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/scan.htm
They do sell Macs with American keyboards in Norway (including laptops! no additional fee) and they have very easy software keyboard layout switching. I have 5 layouts on my OSX, and at least as many on my iPhone.
Since I'm a software developer I've switched to US layout some years ago and never looked back.
Luckily the company I work for provides QWERTY and AZERTY laptops to its employees.
Of course it is! In Poland its perfectly reasonable to ignore all "weird" polish characters. Ą ą Ć ć Ę ę Ł ł Ń ń Ó ó Ś ś Ź ź Ż ż? hell no. I started using computers in ~90, never ever in my life configured local keyboard variant.
>commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer
brilliant, nothing like one more standard to ignore!
offtopic: BBC Video volume slider goes to 11 (haha), but is too quiet even at full volume :(. BBC should have people/systems responsible for this type of stuff, its not rocket science to normalize volume :/. You can always lower volume on the client if its too loud, but there are no easy ways of making very quiet stuff louder (other than passing it thru sound editor).
Also if you are on Windows you can use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) which is a free tool to develop keyboard layouts.
It seems to me that it's a problem (or bunch of problems) that already has a solution(s). I'm right now using a QWERTY layout under Linux. I can code and type English directly, use the compose key to type in French, German and Breton and use a keyboard input (currently fcitx) to type in Chinese. Add to this the fact that you can easily input complex signs that you wouldn't find on keyboards like µ or €. And all this is actually pretty easy to use. I'm sure there are equivalents in Microsoft and MacOS. Why look further?