Comment by dcminter
14 hours ago
It's definitely a matter of what you're familiar with. As a Linux user I'm able to use the "Compose Character" key (I map the right-hand Ctrl key to it) and then use that to write diacritics just as I used to in my university computer lab in the '90s on DEC VT220 terminals!
It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,
Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.
I used a Mac for a long time, but since Polish uses diacritics heavily, the default position of Option was just terrible for touch typing. I have always simply swapped Option and Command because of that. That was always there in the system's keyboard settings, so no extra tools were needed.
It was only when I moved to overriding CapsLock that I installed Karabiner.
That's not too different from macOS's approach, instead of compose-character you learn the shortcuts for composing with the diacritics or special characters. After I learnt them it has always been quite efficient, I can write in Swedish or Portuguese without thinking.
Just curious why compose-character combo for å is a/o though, it would make more sense to me to be a/a.
> Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating.
Absolutely agree, I never use the Swedish software layout even on keyboards which are physically using a Swedish layout, it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
> it would make more sense to me to be a/a
Yep, but I think it's intended to be a visual mnemonic. å looks like a tiny 'o' over the top of an 'a' even though that's not the letter combination it originated with.
> it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...
The series of RSI inducing vulcan neck pinches required to write C-like languages on a Nordic Mac layout drives me a bit mad, but I do have it in my body memory now when needs must!
I toy with the idea of designing my own 40%-ish keyboard just so I only have myself to blame for bad layout :)