this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
128 points (88.1% liked)
Programming
16760 readers
250 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I use the UK layout, because I am British. Why would I use the US layout?
Average American trying to comprehend that people from other countries exist
... or just didn't know UK keyboards were different
I mean the layout they mentioned is called "US" layout I'm sure they could deduct that there are other country specific ones
I've seen Tomorrow Never Dies, so I know there are Chinese keyboards.
The UK speaks English though, so I would have figured a UK keyboard would be at least very similar to a US keyboard, enough so that switching from one to the other wouldn't be too hard.
Every language has a different lay out because they are all based upon the typing machine.
Which needed a specific layout so the hammers didn't hit each other during commonly typed letters.
And yes, British English is a different language than American English. That is why you have things like colour and color.
US-defaultism has a catch: it sometimes accidentally extends to the Commonwealth. You won't run into most of the internationalization quirks if all you're comparing is "British English vs American English".
[Sidebar: I notice this also when English speakers online assume that their audience at least has a vague idea of what Imperial units are, but while that is true of most native English speakers in the northern hemisphere who use feet and miles colloquially, for ESL audiences it's almost always incorrect]
I switched from AZERTY to US QWERTY permanently specifically to avoid all the issues of badly internationalized software. Bad default bindings (e.g. common vim operations like
{
requiring the use of AltGr), but also things like games not working at all or only partially (e.g. the number row being either unbindable, or key hints naively showing as "&" and "é" instead of "1" and "2"). Surprisingly few devs understand the difference between key codes and characters, and lots of indie games straight up don't even internationalize and require switching layouts (good luck if there is an in-game chat).After getting into mechanical keyboards, the ANSI US keyboard layout has been useful as well because these are quite common. ISO mechanical keyboards are rarer, and Belgian AZERTY keycaps are borderline nonexistent.
Also in practice I use the qwerty-fr layout which is the US layout with a French layer on AltGr. The kicker? It's better at writing French than the French AZERTY which is missing a lot of letters (Ç, æ, œ, À, ...). AZERTY is a terrible layout but that's a separate discussion.
Of course the Americans should develop properly internationalized software, but I personally know several fellow Belgians who switched to QWERTY for (some of) the reasons outlined above.
Fellow Belgian here. I also switched to QWERTY.