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Comment by j_4

6 years ago

>in Germany/Europe

Wow, I honestly didn't know how widespread non-QWERTY keyboards are in Europe. Wikipedia has a nice map.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTZ

I live in Poland and we pretty much exclusively have QWERTY. QWERTZ is a historal artifact. Not sure if that's still the case but at least until recently, it was installed by default on Windows as an alternative layout, seemingly mostly to confuse non-technical people when they accidentally press the Ctrl+Shift combination to swap.

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j_4

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chrizel  6 years ago

Interesting. But we have to be clear here: It‘s not only about QWERTZ vs QWERTY. Many countries still have ISO keyboard layout: a tall return key and the left shift key is short (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY). The US keyboard is different: the return key is wide and not tall, and the left shift key is also wider. If you once got used to the US layout, it‘s annoying to use an ISO layout, because your pinkies have to move a little larger distance to hit return and left shift, if you know what I mean. :-)

  • j_4  6 years ago

    Oh! That's true. I think you have it a bit mixed up though.

    - ANSI is the same thing as US, it's the one with a long left Shift and single row Return

    - ISO is the one with a short left Shift, two row Return, and the [| \] key in two places

    I've certainly used both throghout my life, it seems both are common enough that I never paid it much mind after first learning how to handle a computer during early childhood.

    I just checked and out of the 5 keyboards in my home right now, 4 (laptops) are ANSI and 1 (standalone, my daily driver) is ISO.

    • chrizel  6 years ago

      Oh sorry, you are right - I‘ve mixed up ANSI with ISO... thanks for the correction!