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Being able to replace the keyboard is especially wonderful because laptops are usually "region-locked". I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relat
by moltopoco 9mo ago
Being able to replace the keyboard is especially wonderful because laptops are usually "region-locked". I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live, and it makes it harder to buy and much harder to sell their Macs.
- encom 9mo agoThis curse extends to mechanical keyboards as well. There exists all sorts of fancy, beautiful and odd keycap sets... for Americans. Some times for German and French. If I get really lucky, I'll find some with a "Nordic" layout, which is an abomination that combines dk/se/no.
- gunalx 9mo agoNot a us user, but ended up with us and uk layout, just because they where easier to find. (also works fine for programming)
- encom 9mo agoYea, the danish layout is objectively terrible[1], but I have many decades of muscle memory with it now... [1] Shift+7 == /, AltGr+¨ == ~. These two in particular are tedious as a Linux user.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoThe solution is to get blank keycaps. Then it doesn’t matter.
- eterm 9mo agoIt does matter, because the phyiscal keys themselves are literally in different places. Comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1DL1fO6Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1DL1fO6Zs Note that weird abomination of a backslash key around the enter key on the US keyboard. There's no way to just map the US keyboard to the UK one.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoSure, I’m familiar with the weird UK layout.
- jenadine 9mo agoIt is the US layout that stands out. The UK layout follows ISO 9995, which most other countries also follow.
- wpm 9mo agoAnd I thank god every day we don't. The ISO keyboard is awful. Left shift is too important of a key to be 1u. I don't need a massive enter key that lives on two rows. Just insane choices.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoThe big enter key I do like. But I’ve ended up using a split keyboard where every key is 1u. All language layouts map to the physical layout in basically the same way.
- happymellon 9mo agoUK is fine. Mac UK is shit.
- dontlaugh 9mo agoIt’s certainly a matter of opinion. I dislike the UK layout, except on macs where it’s just about ok.
- happymellon 9mo agoThey hide # behind additional key combination, and expose §. It's awful.
- 9mo ago
- encom 9mo agoKind of true, but it's an aesthetics issue as well. The doubleshot keycaps look so nice :)
- adrian_b 9mo agoI use a Dvorak-based layout on Qwerty keyboards, so in normal usage they could as well have blank keycaps. Despite that, the Qwerty keycaps remain useful for me, because my keyboards are not programmable, so the key mapping is done by the operating system. When I have to unlock the computer with a password, after booting, the keyboard still works as Qwerty and the keycaps help me in entering the password, because nowadays I touch-type only on Dvorak, while on Qwerty I must return to hunt-and-peck, as there are many years since I stopped using Qwerty. So only because of this password entering, I prefer to not have blank keycaps, even if I ignore them in normal usage.
- nomel 9mo agowhat do you mean? If you get the key caps, they're trivially swapped. I use Dvorak, and I've swapped keys for every generation of keyboard over the last 10 years. Once swapped, the layout can be set system wide.
- Wingman4l7 9mo agoThey're really not -- Mac scissor switches are pretty delicate, and it's easy to do damage to the tiny plastic nubs on the keycaps or the switches... and if you damage the metal retaining frame in any way, you're toast (Mac laptop keyboards are virtually unreplaceable, being buried in the "bottom" of the unibody chassis).
- nomel 9mo agoWhat are you basing this on? I've swapped ~579 keys (6 MacBook keyboards, and one magic keyboard) with exactly one broken plastic bit from the very first key tried, before looking up the youtube video on how to do it. Damaging the metal retaining frame is impossible when removing or installing them appropriately, so the technique you used was very very wrong. They're easily and trivially popped off and on, if done right. Great care is not needed, with the whole processes taking me around ~10 minutes.
- LTL_FTC 9mo agoI think they mean different regions have physically different layouts. I supported users in different countries and know that French layouts are different than Hebrew layouts which are different from English layouts and so on. Trying to buy different key caps doesn’t give the user a native layout because the shapes of the layouts are somewhat different.
- happymellon 9mo ago> I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live I will always loath the Mac UK keyboard layout. Wildly different than ISO and ANSI for absolutely no benefit.