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)?
I use Coleman DH and symbols have never been an issue because I just put them on another layer 😅
I used to use the Brazilian ABNT-2 layout, it’s pretty much just a US layout with accent keys that activate like a second layer for some specific keys to display specific Portuguese language characters such as ç á à â ã é è etc. It’s surprisingly ok for programming as it doesn’t get in the way because you have special keys to activate the 2nd layer and most of them you need to spread shift + something in order to activate them. I’d say it’s a good layout.
I’m Czech and also speak fluent German, but I rarely use my native languages on my personal PC, so I got used to the US layout. Nowadays I use US layouts that have my native letters on the AltGr key, my Linux pc has an “American - Czech, Slovak, German” layout like that and at work on windows I use the Czech Programmer layout. However, most of my coworkers use the regular Czech keyboard, even for programing, which freaks me out.
It depends on what you’re used to and the programming languages you use. I learned typing on a German QWERTZ keyboard and while that works for languages like Python and Haskell, which are indentation-based, but for languages which use braces like Java, C, Rust, or similar, it can be annoying to have to use altgr+7 or altgr+0 for { and }. Thus I switched to a US ANSI layout, which was nicer for those specific characters, but caused problems when typing local characters like öäüß. After switching to Linux I set up a compose key, letting me press compose + a + " for ä for example, and while that’s a decent patch, that still breaks the typing flow. So now I’m in my ergo keyboard phase and trying to get my own personal layout going, which meets my own needs for needed characters, based on a colemak-dh design.
I used to use ANSI, but then moved to England and bought a laptop and returned it because of the “weird” ISO keyboard, then forever bought dell because I could customise it.
Moved back to ANSIland, but will still probably just buy dell.
