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As a kid, I remember being utterly confused, when most games with a console would have the key ` to open it. WTF is the key ` and where is it? For a kid it was
by j1elo 6y ago
As a kid, I remember being utterly confused, when most games with a console would have the key ` to open it. WTF is the key ` and where is it?
For a kid it wasn't that easy to understand that there are such things as different keyboard layouts. Turns out that ` is a single key press to the left of the '1', in English, while it is a bit obscure character to write in other languages. In mine, you have º and ª in that place... so no ` at sight.
But game devs assume that ` is just a keypress away in a confortable area of the keyboard, and it became the de facto way to open in-game consoles. Oh well.
- Macha 6y agoAlso programming languages used it as an alias for exec. Even if you have a ` key, on some layouts (such as the Irish keyboard layout) it can be a weird key to type due to dead key behaviour, often requiring multiple presses to respond and eating the next keypress.
- johannboehme 6y agoyeah.. i never use js template strings because of that frigging unusable backtick character. Ist so hard to type on my layout, that its just not worth it -_-
- gerdesj 6y agoWe all suffer from character blindness of some sort. For you: ` - that thing isn't formally defined in English either as far as I know. In English we don't have any diacritics. We do have a few extra symbols, beyond the alphabet for certain situations. Quotations ... " ... meh should be 66 99 and that will be fixed up by DTP software. We use ' to denote a dropped letter - abbreviation. There are a few others. I won't dwell on "thorne" and ligatures and other oddities. I do not know of any reason to write ` - it is not an apostrophe, which is: '. What is it?
- remexre 6y agoI think back in the day (typewriters thru... 90s?) you wrote quoted text `like this.'
- CamTin 6y agoThis still seems to be "house style" for a certain brand of "old school" open source mailing list.
- fasquoika 6y agoThis is how both TeX and m4 do quoting by default so presumably common when they were created (mid-eighties and early seventies respectively IIRC)
- kergonath 6y agoIt’s an ASCII approximation of the proper typography for single quotes (except when you’d use inverted quotes for some reason, not sure how common it is in English). Similarly, LaTeX uses `` and ‘’ for double quotes because the opening and closing symbols are not the same in properly typeset texts.
- gibspaulding 6y ago> What is it? Not sure if you meant this literally, but I've seen it refered to as a back tick. As to what it's for, I have no idea either. I can't recall ever seeing it outside of programming.
- chmod775 6y agoOn a mechanical typewriter you'd have a button that would "revert" the position you'll write to by one character - also known as backspace. So if you pressed backspace followed by "`", you'd give the last character a grave accent. That's my theory for it being called backtick anyways. Nowadays you could configure your input method to make that key give the next character a grave accent
- Dylan16807 6y agoI'm pretty sure it's called "back" because of the direction it tilts.
- gerdesj 6y agoMy mum had a mechanical typewriter and yes it would do that. However English has no formal diacritics. We do have shit loads of borrow words from French and others that do have them. If the back tick on the en_GB keyboard is a sop for the grave accent, then why do we not have an acute accent available as well? or a cedilla for that matter?
- velosol 6y agoIt's the grave accent - pretty rare in English outside of loan words from other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent#English
- alias_neo 6y agoTouché
- cannabis_sam 6y agoI am not claiming to be a learnèd man, but I believe that is an acute accent, not a grave accent.
- alias_neo 6y agoYou are absolutely correct. Je suis désolé.
- abrowne 6y agoASCII has a limited number of characters, so they designed it so some do double-duty. The grave could be a grace accent if you backspaced over a letter, or it could be an opening quote mark. The apostrophe was the reverse: it could be the acute accent. The fonts were drawn so these characters were angled enough to be accents, but also looked like quote marks. The apostrophe wasn't a vertical prime sign. Angle brackets and greater/lesser-than also double-up.
- Semaphor 6y agoNote that ' is not technically a proper apostrophe which would be ’ instead. It only came to be thanks to typewriters having limited character space.
- bradrn 6y ago> In mine, you have º and ª in that place... Out of curiosity, what keyboard layout do you use?
- aurelianito 6y agoDon't know about parent, but latin-american keyboard is like that.
- hutzlibu 6y agoI remember that too. But the console you only open sometimes. But everyday(!), I have to use {[(| ... and they are just awkward to reach on a german layout.
- f1refly 6y agoYou might find https://neo-layout.org https://neo-layout.org very useful for daily use. They provide a version that bolts the utility layers onto qwertz as well.
- raverbashing 6y agoYeah, sorry but the continental European keyboard maps with those keys in the number row suck. There's no ifs or buts about that. I have learned on the US keyboard and keep using it more or less.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoLast time I needed a new laptop (my old one died) I took a 8 hour train to travel to the Netherlands from Munich instead of back home to Berlin (where I live) just so I could visit a store that has laptops with a non German layout (US international). The only way to get a non German keyboard in Germany is to order them online and wait for a week+ (typically) for that to ship internationally (because they don't stock these locally). That was clearly unacceptable. So, 8 hour train ride it was because I needed a replacement in a hurry and I got to visit my parents. Win win. The alternative would have been buying a laptop with literally every key I care about in the wrong place in some local store. It's great that alternate keyboard layouts are available to those that actually need/want them but it really sucks that you get locked into these choices just because of where you are. Local shop owners don't seem to have any commercial sense whatsoever. Here's a genius idea in a city full of expats (Berlin, Munich), you know, maybe stock a few laptops with international keyboards. Even the local Apple store doesn't do that. And any time you go there, a very meaningful percentage of the customers is clearly not German. Every non German buying a German keyboard because they have to is basically an unhappy customer. I know loads of foreigners here moaning about German keyboards. I've never met a non German that actually prefers having keys in the wrong place. That's not a thing; it's bloody annoying. It's equally annoying in other countries where expats live. E.g. French keyboard layouts are worse, AZERTY instead of QWERTY. At least in Germany you get QWERTZ (Y and Z are swapped). I've actually met quite a few German programmers that remap their keyboards so they can program without having to use four fingers to produce a single key-press.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 908B64B197 6y ago` is bad because it looks like '. A lot of programming resources I've seen have an explicit explanation that the backtick is a different character than the single quote. Better yet, some fonts make the two almost identical.