Comment by chrizel
6 years ago
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!)
Even on GNU/Linux distribution it is a settings that must be enabled first, but at least it tends to be present as a first-class option right from the start.
I can't stand those weird alt-codes Windows users end up memorizing. You only know those characters for which you've learned the codes. With the compose-key, you can guess anything that is diacritic character, and lots more besides¹.
I showed a colleague on a Windows computer WinCompose when she got wanted to be able to easily type a number of special characters (like en- and em-dash) without having to hunt for them in a character map or remember arcane alt-codes. She's not a developer, but it clicked instantly. Just think of a logical sequence, and get the character you want (for en- and em-dash its [compose - - .] and [compose - - -], respectively).
1: Like superscript numbers. Once you know that [compose ^ 1] yields ¹, you know ²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰ too.
I honestly prefer just using right alt as a AltGr. Even have a custom Windows layout to re-create (parts of) the "US International (with dead keys)" layout from Linux/X/GNOME/wherever it comes from.
Instead of having to type <Compose ' o> for a ó, I just type <AltGr+o> (or alternatively, <AltGr+' o>, and similarly <AltGr+` o> for a ò)
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 :)