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Ask HN: Keyboard layout while changing countries

2 points by paradoja ↗ HN
I'll be probably changing countries soon. Different countries, with different languages, have different keyboard layouts. It may be a bit of a silly question, but it has popped up in my head: should you keep your original country's keyboard layout or should you adapt?

Adapting means losing quite some speed for some time and if you change countries each few years may be a bit frustrating.

Not adapting means you keep your typing speed, but you'll have difficulties with other peoples computers and maybe problems to write some symbols (eg. writing ß in an american keyboard).

What other issues are there to consider?

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] thread
michael_dorfman
When I moved from the US to Norway, I started buying Norwegian keyboards. This way I have easy access to the special Norwegian characters, and the loss of typing speed while I re-trained the keyboard layout was minimal and temporary. Of course, one of the factors was that it was a one-way move; I'm not planning on moving elsewhere anytime soon.

If you're planning on staying in the new country a while, I'd suggest taking the one-time hit, and switching.

davidw
I'm not so sure... I think it depends some on what you're doing. I absolutely loathe using Italian keyboards for programming, and indeed, I tell anyone that needs me to do programming work with a computer not my own that I need a US keyboard. If you do a lot of writing in the new language, then, yeah, access to whatever funky characters might be a time saver.

However, on the other hand, on Italian keyboards, { and }, if I recall correctly, require some alt key sequence, so you either remap them to something of your own via your editor, or go mad in short order.

Yaggo
If you are native user of US layout, you probably will have hard time adapting non-US layouts which don't have separate keys for typical programming punctuation keys (such as <[{}]>).
mrspeaker
The Azerty format (used widely in France) is horrible for coding - curly braces are a 3 key combo, so I'm typing on an azerty keyboard with qwerty bindings!

Most of my co-workers also prefer qwerty for coding, but azerty has better access to é and ç etc... I'm not typing much prose, so I'm sticking with qwerty for now.

madhouse
I would continue to use whatever layout I was using before up until the point where my speed or convenience starts to suffer.

Once I find myself trying to type stuff that'd be easier with a native layout, I'd change. Not a moment before.

In my case, chances are I'd be still writing code mostly, for which my layout is perfectly adequate. The odd native-language text is no big deal, not worth switching to a different layout just because of that. Only when those become the majority.

Granted, when trying to use someone else's keyboard, it becomes a bit of a problem. But that's why you tell people to make it easy to switch between their layout, and yours (and in turn, you set up your computer to be able to switch to their layout aswell).

At work, I have three layouts: the plain old boring US qwerty, hungarian qwertz (for those collegues who prefer that), and programmer dvorak. Takes a single key combo to switch to any of them, and everyone's happy.