Comment by brnt
6 years ago
No need to import from the US, in your friendly western neighbor (Netherlands) US qwerty keyboards are the default.
Also, when I lived in France, it was a matter of a phonecall to Dell to get a US qwerty keyboard instead of azerty. No problem at all. I think a colleague asked for an 'English' keyboard and got a UK qwerty, that's the only thing to be wary of.
Really? So it‘s real US and not some kind of ISO English?
Yeah, I‘ve seen that Dell for example sells US BTO options in the Netherlands, but in the past (when I considered an XPS 13), dell.nl didn‘t ship to Germany. But obviously the times have changed, and it‘s much easier today to get US keyboards than 10 or 20 years ago.
As far as I know Dutch keyboards have your basic US layout plus the € sign as a third glyph printed on the [% / 5] key. I've bought my US layout DasKeyboards from a German retailer online though.
Real Dutch keyboard layouts never took off unlike what happened in France and Germany. We're not that dependant on our diacritic characters (although I am a stickler for correct usage).
Personally, I prefer the standard US layout, because I use more than one language. For Dutch („éë耔), English (“—”), and German („ßöüä”) the compose key does everything I need and more. For Japanese there is a dedicated IME (Anthy).
I wish Windows and MacOS included a Compose key by default. It's so simple that everyone could easily learn it, and we wouldn't have to deal with arcane Numpad key combinations on Windows or MacOS's super unintuitive and inconsistent symbol shortcuts.
On Windows, I use WinCompose[1], which works decently well.
[1] https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose (Trivia: WinCompose was originally written in AutoHotkey!)
2 replies →
I have been using US keyboard layouts for more than 20 years. You can get them relatively easily from German online retailers, even for notebooks. I've been working with Lenovo/Thinkpad hardware for 15 years now and eventually found the US variant for each model (also because Lenovo gives exact part numbers for each variant). I also own several external Thinkpad keyboards with this layout. The only problem is that you often can't configure them when you first buy the main unit. Therefore I have a stack of German keyboards lying around here :)