I’ve used a US-QWERTY keyboard layout my entire life. I’ve seen other layouts that do things like reduce the size of the enter/backspace keys, move the pipe operator (|) and can’t wrap my head around how I would code on those.
What are your experiences? Are there any layouts that you prefer for coding over US English? Are there any symbols that you have a hard time reaching ($ for example)?
I’m not used to the US Keyboard layout.
I think I only used it when I got a cheap second hand notebook in Canada during my vacations there.
The reason not to change the keyboard layout to something different from the physical layout is that once in a while you have to use a seldom used symbol for which you don’t really have the touch-typing muscle memory, and looking at a physical keyboard with a different layour from the one you’re using at the software level won’t tell you were that symbol is, turning the whole thing into an unnecessary PITA of trying to find it by trial and error (I usually get this the other way around: when the software defaults to US Layout but my actual keyboard doesn’t have that layout).
I do more than just programming on keyboards and some of the languages (spoken, not programming) I write in have accents and funny characters which don’t even appear in a US Layout keyboard.
Also sometimes you really don’t have much of a choice if you’re in some country and the local employer/hotel/internet-caffee provides some local keyboard and you don’t have the permissions to change the layout in the OS.
Yeah, yeah, you do have to climb and overcome the small learning-curve of learning to adjust to new keyboards, but once you have it’s not at all a big deal to adjust to whatever you happen to get your hands on.