4 ms·
As someone else pointed out [0], and I concur with, macOS does a good job on this. You can type e.g. German umlauts (äöü) and eszett (ß) effortlessly (Option+u
by guitarbill 6y ago
As someone else pointed out [0], and I concur with, macOS does a good job on this. You can type e.g. German umlauts (äöü) and eszett (ß) effortlessly (Option+u a/o/u, and Option+s respectively), or British Pounds (£, Option+#, where it would be on a UK keyboard), all on an ANSI layout. Maybe less so for «», which is Option+\ and Option+| (i.e. Option+Shift+\). Might've been nicer to put these on Option+[ and Option+].
Personally, I've always hated the ISO enter key and QWERTZ (although that's a bit of a tangent). I also think having a different keyboard for every European language is a losing strategy, especially when people might be required to type in two languages. If you know about it, for some languages the macOS approach works really well.
iOS is also passable; a long press brings up options (e.g. on s -> ß/ś/š). It's a bit more tedious.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457638
- asplake 6y agoAgreed, but pertinent to this article I do find the key combinations for ‘’ and “” slightly annoying. They’re on adjacent keys but I’d much rather shift went from single to double than from left to right. Unmodified, the keys themselves are for left and right square and curly brackets and work “correctly”
- intellirogue 6y agoThe long press (which also works on macOS) is really handy when you need to enter a character that you don't already know the key combo for. As far as I can tell there's nothing like it in Windows - if you don't know how to input a special character, you have to open Character Map - which bugs me as someone living in continental Europe but using a US keyboard.