Never buy a German keyboard!

on Friday, June 09, 2006

Nothing personal, but the backtick/tilde is located where the rest of the left shift key should be, and the return key is double-height, forcing the backslash/bar to the right of the dash/underscore (that'd be the apostrophe/double quote for pretty much everyone else who types qwerty). Note that I'm talking about using a German keyboard with an English layout. The German layout is flat out impossible for coding.

For some reason it gets even worse with a German Apple keyboard. Square brackets, where for art though? Through trial and error I found them using Alt/Opt+5/6... non-Apple German keyboards I've seen use Alt Gr+8/9, which is just as bad but at least they were labeled. I know why coders here don't use the German layout! I feel uneasy just talking about it.

Here's a text file with each character of the 4 rows in it, normal and then shifted, in qwerty, qwertz, and dvorak. I personally think that some ways the German keys change must be some sick joke (double quote moved up to shift-2, single quote almost staying put, angle brackets being shoved aside only to put the semi-colon and colon on different keys as well). If you ask me lots of that could be avoided by getting rid of the key that replaced the backtick/tilde, and putting the 3 vowels with the umlaut (ü, ö, and ä) on Alt Gr/Opt+<a, o, u>. But hey, I don't type in German so what do I know.