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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 keybo

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.

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.