10 ms·

Finally, someone offering a proper Danish keyboard. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have long been stymied with the low-effort that is the Nordic keyboard layout.

by Svip 2y ago

Finally, someone offering a proper Danish keyboard. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have long been stymied with the low-effort that is the Nordic keyboard layout. The problem is if you are not familiar with keyboards, then the labels are supposed to help you, but they don't on the Nordic layouts, because it just show three different keymap's labels on some keys, but you don't know which belong to which. I know Apple also offers a proper Danish keyboard, and I've seen some modern Thinkpads with proper Danish keyboards. I normally use a US Intl keyboard, but whenever I see a Danish keyboard, I struggle to find the | key.

wordofx 2y ago
lol someone hasn’t seen some international keyboards.
- robxorb 2y ago
  Can someone explain to my why some keyboard layouts hide some of the most important terminal punctuation in everyday use? For example, on an Apple Swedish keyboard you're not allowed to natively access your home directory ~, nor pipe anything |. What idiot came up with that, or is there legitimate reason?
  - OJFord 2y ago
    They come from typewriters presumably, not designed for teletypes nevermind modern terminal emulators.
  - afiori 2y ago
    localized keyboards layouts are quite a bit old.
  - creshal 2y ago
    They're recycling typewriter layouts that optimized for what was at the time more important to the average user, making common non-latin characters more accessible. And arguably, for the average user, it's still the right choice. It's only IT nerds who really need all those weird extra characters that aren't even real punctuation, and they can just switch over to the US layout.
    - exitb 2y ago
      That's true, but also not really an explanation. There is a Polish keyboard layout that's derived from a typewriter, but got abandoned very early on in PCs, even though Polish has 9 additional characters.
      - SSLy 2y ago
        because Poles had to smuggle computers in, the supply was coming from USA, and then it was too late.
      - philistine 2y ago
        Every single keyboard layout has its own story. Let me tell you the one about the keyboard layout I use: CAN/CSA Z243.200-92. When writing French on typewriters, people in Québec and the rest of Canada used a slightly modified US-keyboard layout that assigned the necessary accents and moved the symbols those keys used elsewhere. You could even use this layout with the US 104-keys keyboards on computers without losing much. Aside from having glyphs on your keys that didn't connect to what you were typing but people lived with it. But when we moved to computers there came an opportunity to improve the keyboard. We could now assign keys to common letters with their accents together without losing anything, since we didn't need to focus on the additive nature of accents. You know, moving from a mechanical system to pure software. So who jumped on the opportunity? The government of Québec led the charge in the early 90s for this new keyboard layout to replace the old French (Canada) layout. Feeling at some point that there was a risk of furthering divide in Canada, the federal government asked for some slight changes to the Québec proposal, in exchange for the promise of adopting it as the standard Canada-wide. Québec agreed, but Canada never did anything of value to help with adoption. So we're stuck with two standards, basically on the line of your OS: if you're on Windows, you're probably using the old French (Canada), and Mac users switched over to the new standard. Every. single. keyboard layout. has a story surrounding its creation and its usage.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Not sure I buy that explanation -- an image search suggests that a lot of US-made typewriters didn't have curly, square, or angle braces, and yet we have them on the standard US keyboard layout.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    No {} either, and | uses different keys.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
    Apple specifically don't label these special characters on their keyboards for some reason, but they aren't inaccessible, you just need to press option/alt. If you use the keyboard layout viewer built-in to macOS, you'll discover there's actually extra letters and symbols on every key!
    - robxorb 2y ago
      Thank you, that's most helpful!
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Because the designers of Unix used whatever keys happened to be available on the teletype keyboards that they had in their lab, and didn’t give a second thought to international keyboard layouts. Programming languages used to be more cognizant of this. For example Pascal used mostly keywords rather than ASCII symbols, and this was entirely intentional to enable programmers in all countries to easily work in the language. Of course C inherited Unix’s approach, killed Pascal, and nobody cares anymore. Except all those millions of non-English users trying to learn programming, but nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about them.
    - lokimedes 2y ago
      Not to be snarky, but which popular programming languages have come out of Silicon Valley? I can think of Swift and perhaps Java (Sun)?
      - xxs 2y ago
        Java did try to be C as much as possible, as language/syntax principles it's pretty much just C.
      - pavlov 2y ago
        Java, JavaScript. Those two adopted the C syntax and cemented it as the baseline for everything that followed. Still in the 1990s, Microsoft had a focus on BASIC which had a keyword-centric syntax. But Java and the web killed that.
Hinrik 2y ago
Even worse for Icelandic ones. Keychron used to show the Icelandic flag on their Nordic keyboard page, despite that layout not including Icelandic-specific characters (Ð / Þ missing, Ö in the wrong place). I asked them to start including those characters, but now they just removed the flag. For Framework I went with a blank ISO layout.
ajnin 2y ago
While we're talking about keyboards, why won't they put dedicated page up/down keys ? There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos. It's one of the reasons that makes me cling on my old Thinkpad for so long, I use them all the time.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  My T420's keyboard has some next/previous page keys there. I have zero idea what to use those for. The previous page key makes a nice additional modifier key though (e.g. for Compose) as it's next to the Ctrl key.
- masklinn 2y ago
  > There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos. In my opinion and experience it’s utter shite: the precision of fingers on half keys is not great, so it’s way too easy to hit the page keys when just trying to move two characters sideways, and now you need a few seconds to realise what the fuck just happened. It’s exactly what my current work laptop has, and if I had to use its internal keyboard for any length of time the laptop would long have gone out the window. If I’m paging, it’s easy enough and a lot more intentional to press the FN up/down key. I could see the argument for TKL laptops but this is garbage and I hate it.
- s2l 2y ago
  Inspired from physical newspaper reading, how about page right/left keys too? Think of infinite canvas apps, games, web carousel, etc.
tokai 2y ago
Nordic keyboards were a mistake. Should be redone. They are bad for both writing and coding. Changed to US International years ago too, and will never go back.
- darthrupert 2y ago
  Yep, agreed. I'm using US Dvorak with modifications to get those äös.
- dcminter 2y ago
  Coding in Swedish keyboard mode in a Mac with (){}[] all on the same two keys with various vulcan neck pinching modifiers is definitely not one of my favourite things!
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    That's an Apple thing, though.
    - dcminter 2y ago
      Oh, I'd assumed this was specific to Swedish Mac keyboards and not a more general Mac thing! How vile!
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
        Not much better on standard Norwegian(non-apple) keyboards. ()[] are on the same two number keys and {} are on the keys surrounding those keys. []{} require alt gr while () require shift. Also $ is alt gr+5 which is revolting. Combined with / being at shift+7, typing in the shell is a terrible experience.
        dcminter 2y ago
        Yeah, I have a Swedish layout Dell as well and it's better but not much. I'm confused now, though, as I took the parent as telling me that non-Swedish Macs also have the horrible symbol placement for the various braces. (rsynnott above clarifies that it's indeed Swedish-specific so it's just the Macs are a bit worse than the PCs). I'm fairly adept at switching between British PC keyboard, Swedish PC keyboard, and Swedish Mac keyboard nowadays, but the latter's significantly the worst (and don't get me started on how default IntelliJ key combos work with that)
Nullabillity 2y ago
You try it once, and you see which colour applies to your language. It's not really a big deal. (And even that's only required to disambiguate between danish and norwegian.) As someone who grew up having to write both on a regular basis, it was neat having both on the same layout. Now that I use Linux it doesn't matter as much since altgr lets me type æø instead of äö, but back on Windows you'd have to switch layout for that. It's too bad they didn't at least ship nordic as a separate option.
- Sammi 2y ago
  I'm looking down at my nordic layout keyboard I've owned to ten years. I have no idea which color is which language.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    What are the colors? If I were tasked to design them, I'd take the red from the Danish flag, yellow from the Swedish one and the blue from the Finnish flag..
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      There isn't really a standard colour scheme AFAIK, but you can tell quickly which one you need to care about. And by the way, it's generally swedish/danish/norwegian. The finnish layout is basically the same as the swedish one.
      - netsharc 2y ago
        Oh no, I forgot about Norway! I guess the blue would be for Norway then.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      You don't need to differentiate between Swedish and Finnish, since the layouts are identical, but between Danish and Norwegian, because Ø and Æ swap places between those two. (So, blue for Norwegian?)
numpad0 2y ago
From reading comments around, is this "Nordic" layout just those four different languages overtyped on top of each others for users to ignore irrelevant parts? That sounds insane.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  It shouldn't really be all that bad; it's just two letters that differ -- both in actual font design and keyboard placement. Swedish and Finnish write the letters Ö and Ä; in Danish and Norwegian they're Æ and Ø. The really weird thing is that the latter swap places between the languages; in Danish the keys are Æ to the left, Ø to the right; in Norwegian it's the other way around. So we have these two keys to the right of L that are marked, respectively, ØÖÆ and ÆÄØ. Fortunately, the Å key seems to be the same for all four languages, and stay put in the row above the aforementioned ones, to the right of P.
  - 3836293648 2y ago
    And a bunch of symbols

by Svip 2y ago

wordofx 2y ago

lol someone hasn’t seen some international keyboards.

robxorb 2y ago
Can someone explain to my why some keyboard layouts hide some of the most important terminal punctuation in everyday use? For example, on an Apple Swedish keyboard you're not allowed to natively access your home directory ~, nor pipe anything |. What idiot came up with that, or is there legitimate reason?
- OJFord 2y ago
  They come from typewriters presumably, not designed for teletypes nevermind modern terminal emulators.
- afiori 2y ago
  localized keyboards layouts are quite a bit old.
- creshal 2y ago
  They're recycling typewriter layouts that optimized for what was at the time more important to the average user, making common non-latin characters more accessible. And arguably, for the average user, it's still the right choice. It's only IT nerds who really need all those weird extra characters that aren't even real punctuation, and they can just switch over to the US layout.
  - exitb 2y ago
    That's true, but also not really an explanation. There is a Polish keyboard layout that's derived from a typewriter, but got abandoned very early on in PCs, even though Polish has 9 additional characters.
    - SSLy 2y ago
      because Poles had to smuggle computers in, the supply was coming from USA, and then it was too late.
    - philistine 2y ago
      Every single keyboard layout has its own story. Let me tell you the one about the keyboard layout I use: CAN/CSA Z243.200-92. When writing French on typewriters, people in Québec and the rest of Canada used a slightly modified US-keyboard layout that assigned the necessary accents and moved the symbols those keys used elsewhere. You could even use this layout with the US 104-keys keyboards on computers without losing much. Aside from having glyphs on your keys that didn't connect to what you were typing but people lived with it. But when we moved to computers there came an opportunity to improve the keyboard. We could now assign keys to common letters with their accents together without losing anything, since we didn't need to focus on the additive nature of accents. You know, moving from a mechanical system to pure software. So who jumped on the opportunity? The government of Québec led the charge in the early 90s for this new keyboard layout to replace the old French (Canada) layout. Feeling at some point that there was a risk of furthering divide in Canada, the federal government asked for some slight changes to the Québec proposal, in exchange for the promise of adopting it as the standard Canada-wide. Québec agreed, but Canada never did anything of value to help with adoption. So we're stuck with two standards, basically on the line of your OS: if you're on Windows, you're probably using the old French (Canada), and Mac users switched over to the new standard. Every. single. keyboard layout. has a story surrounding its creation and its usage.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Not sure I buy that explanation -- an image search suggests that a lot of US-made typewriters didn't have curly, square, or angle braces, and yet we have them on the standard US keyboard layout.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  No {} either, and | uses different keys.
- TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
  Apple specifically don't label these special characters on their keyboards for some reason, but they aren't inaccessible, you just need to press option/alt. If you use the keyboard layout viewer built-in to macOS, you'll discover there's actually extra letters and symbols on every key!
  - robxorb 2y ago
    Thank you, that's most helpful!
- pavlov 2y ago
  Because the designers of Unix used whatever keys happened to be available on the teletype keyboards that they had in their lab, and didn’t give a second thought to international keyboard layouts. Programming languages used to be more cognizant of this. For example Pascal used mostly keywords rather than ASCII symbols, and this was entirely intentional to enable programmers in all countries to easily work in the language. Of course C inherited Unix’s approach, killed Pascal, and nobody cares anymore. Except all those millions of non-English users trying to learn programming, but nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about them.
  - lokimedes 2y ago
    Not to be snarky, but which popular programming languages have come out of Silicon Valley? I can think of Swift and perhaps Java (Sun)?
    - xxs 2y ago
      Java did try to be C as much as possible, as language/syntax principles it's pretty much just C.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Java, JavaScript. Those two adopted the C syntax and cemented it as the baseline for everything that followed. Still in the 1990s, Microsoft had a focus on BASIC which had a keyword-centric syntax. But Java and the web killed that.

Hinrik 2y ago

Even worse for Icelandic ones. Keychron used to show the Icelandic flag on their Nordic keyboard page, despite that layout not including Icelandic-specific characters (Ð / Þ missing, Ö in the wrong place). I asked them to start including those characters, but now they just removed the flag. For Framework I went with a blank ISO layout.

ajnin 2y ago

While we're talking about keyboards, why won't they put dedicated page up/down keys ? There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos. It's one of the reasons that makes me cling on my old Thinkpad for so long, I use them all the time.

notpushkin 2y ago
My T420's keyboard has some next/previous page keys there. I have zero idea what to use those for. The previous page key makes a nice additional modifier key though (e.g. for Compose) as it's next to the Ctrl key.
masklinn 2y ago
> There are 2 empty spots right above the left/right keys that would be ideal for this and are basically just wasted, being left empty, as one can see on the photos. In my opinion and experience it’s utter shite: the precision of fingers on half keys is not great, so it’s way too easy to hit the page keys when just trying to move two characters sideways, and now you need a few seconds to realise what the fuck just happened. It’s exactly what my current work laptop has, and if I had to use its internal keyboard for any length of time the laptop would long have gone out the window. If I’m paging, it’s easy enough and a lot more intentional to press the FN up/down key. I could see the argument for TKL laptops but this is garbage and I hate it.
s2l 2y ago
Inspired from physical newspaper reading, how about page right/left keys too? Think of infinite canvas apps, games, web carousel, etc.

tokai 2y ago

Nordic keyboards were a mistake. Should be redone. They are bad for both writing and coding. Changed to US International years ago too, and will never go back.

darthrupert 2y ago
Yep, agreed. I'm using US Dvorak with modifications to get those äös.
dcminter 2y ago
Coding in Swedish keyboard mode in a Mac with (){}[] all on the same two keys with various vulcan neck pinching modifiers is definitely not one of my favourite things!
- Nullabillity 2y ago
  That's an Apple thing, though.
  - dcminter 2y ago
    Oh, I'd assumed this was specific to Swedish Mac keyboards and not a more general Mac thing! How vile!
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
      Not much better on standard Norwegian(non-apple) keyboards. ()[] are on the same two number keys and {} are on the keys surrounding those keys. []{} require alt gr while () require shift. Also $ is alt gr+5 which is revolting. Combined with / being at shift+7, typing in the shell is a terrible experience.
      - dcminter 2y ago
        Yeah, I have a Swedish layout Dell as well and it's better but not much. I'm confused now, though, as I took the parent as telling me that non-Swedish Macs also have the horrible symbol placement for the various braces. (rsynnott above clarifies that it's indeed Swedish-specific so it's just the Macs are a bit worse than the PCs). I'm fairly adept at switching between British PC keyboard, Swedish PC keyboard, and Swedish Mac keyboard nowadays, but the latter's significantly the worst (and don't get me started on how default IntelliJ key combos work with that)

Nullabillity 2y ago

You try it once, and you see which colour applies to your language. It's not really a big deal. (And even that's only required to disambiguate between danish and norwegian.) As someone who grew up having to write both on a regular basis, it was neat having both on the same layout. Now that I use Linux it doesn't matter as much since altgr lets me type æø instead of äö, but back on Windows you'd have to switch layout for that. It's too bad they didn't at least ship nordic as a separate option.

Sammi 2y ago
I'm looking down at my nordic layout keyboard I've owned to ten years. I have no idea which color is which language.
- netsharc 2y ago
  What are the colors? If I were tasked to design them, I'd take the red from the Danish flag, yellow from the Swedish one and the blue from the Finnish flag..
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    There isn't really a standard colour scheme AFAIK, but you can tell quickly which one you need to care about. And by the way, it's generally swedish/danish/norwegian. The finnish layout is basically the same as the swedish one.
    - netsharc 2y ago
      Oh no, I forgot about Norway! I guess the blue would be for Norway then.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    You don't need to differentiate between Swedish and Finnish, since the layouts are identical, but between Danish and Norwegian, because Ø and Æ swap places between those two. (So, blue for Norwegian?)

numpad0 2y ago

From reading comments around, is this "Nordic" layout just those four different languages overtyped on top of each others for users to ignore irrelevant parts? That sounds insane.

CRConrad 2y ago
It shouldn't really be all that bad; it's just two letters that differ -- both in actual font design and keyboard placement. Swedish and Finnish write the letters Ö and Ä; in Danish and Norwegian they're Æ and Ø. The really weird thing is that the latter swap places between the languages; in Danish the keys are Æ to the left, Ø to the right; in Norwegian it's the other way around. So we have these two keys to the right of L that are marked, respectively, ØÖÆ and ÆÄØ. Fortunately, the Å key seems to be the same for all four languages, and stay put in the row above the aforementioned ones, to the right of P.
- 3836293648 2y ago
  And a bunch of symbols