I use the Swiss layout for the exact same reasons. Plus, it’s easy to find here in Switzerland. The only extra keys are the ones one uses a lot when typing German and French.
The main problem with the German layout IMHO, and all layouts in its family, is the infuriatingly tiny left shift key. The Netherlands has the same disease. I map the useless key next to it as a shift as well, at least that way I can type without getting pinkie arthritis.
Have been using a US keyboard and never looked back to the Swiss one. Much better for programming and accents and umlauts are still easy to type. As I also occasionally type in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and French, I find the US keyboard to be the neutral middle ground.
(I'm half joking, half serious - I grew up with a qwertz DE nodeadkey layout which certainly doesn't look sane from the outside either and exclusively use the US one now)
Full agreement from me. My ergonomics and efficiency both improved immensely when I switched from my native layout to US International.
With US International, unless I want to hit the key combo to change layouts, I can still write a single or just a few umlauts (say, for a person's name).
I find it easier to keep my focus when I don't have to make the right wrist twister that is otherwise required for { if using a Swedish layout.
I am German and I use the US (Colemak) layout,because the German layout is very annoying for programming. I rarely use my laptops keyboard. I would rather carry a smaller external keyboard around (Atreus or similar) if I would need to use Laptops I do not own.
I also find the best layout for French is the US one with Mac-style modifiers. Alt E + E -> É, etc. Direct access to braces and numbers, which is great for programming. And it also doesn't break the ' and ` keys, which US international breaks on Windows, since you have to type them twice to get the regular character.
As others have said, I'm not a professional typist having to follow along in a court of law or whatever. I don't remember ever being limited in my work by my typing speed. So not having to learn weird layouts and adapt when I change computers or in non-ideal situations (think BIOS passwords and the like), deal with weird shortcut placements, etc is much more of a win than pumping out more words per minute.
1. The author mentions that the french (belgian) layout is more popular in luxembourg that the swiss (french) layout. Anecdotally, I can not agree with this. As a luxembourgish person, encountering many keyboards in schools, offices, through laptops i bought etc, the swiss (french) layout is by far the most common. I have never seen an Azerty used in practice except by french people. The second most common seems to be German Qwertz, that could also be because there is no amazon.lu but instead most people i know order through amazon.de which of course mostly shows german keyboards so its easy to buy it on accident.
2. I once did an exchange semester of university in France, where i was forced to use their computers for programming. Not only did I start 2 weeks after the other students due to timing issues with my primary university, but then I also had some very stressful weeks learning to program on azerty keyboards. It was very painful at first and i nearly went back to two-finger typing, but in the end after 5 months i became more fluent than i expected on azerty.
3. 3 years ago (i was around 24 years old) I decided to switch from my layout i used until then (ISO, swiss french) to the Ansi Us layout, and I am happy i did the switch. It is so much better for programming, especially wrt to [] {} (). And I even prefer typing diacritics by using US international. I write fluently in french and german with this and I like it. The main pain point was switching from vertical to horizontal enter, I typed \ for months...
I am puzzled by the lack of keyboard layouts for Switzerland (we have the cash to spend on such novelties!). Also, no DVORAK? Is this for hackers or not?
French Canadian $99
English International $99
German $99
US English $99
French $99
British English $99
Clear ANSI $109
Blank ANSI $109
Black ISO $109
Clear ISO $109
You'll never find an optimal layout, they're all compromises.
I've switched to US intl 15 years ago and I don't type in French any slower than I used to. On the other hand I benefit greatly from using the default layout in our very US-centric field.
I use a compose key and the British layout. It’s fine for French, Spanish and German at least, and I can add my own sequences (e.g. for logical notation).
Not sure it's comforting but after exposure to french and swiss keyboard layouts, the canadian one is for me a sweet spot. It's "almost standard qwerty" while allowing to write in french properly. "US International with dead keys" is workable but somehow weirder and less consistent between OSX and Linux.
I did have a phase where I was using US layout over German, because I do agree that US layout is just more suitable for programming.
But training my muscle memory that way turned out to be more of a pain than a gain.
As a freelancer, I'm frequently in a situation where I'm forced to use a laptop that a client has provided, with a German layout. Oftentimes I will not have an external keyboard on hand, like I'm in a meeting room and didn't want to bring one, or I'm on a plane or train.
In order to make that work, you'd need to be a pretty disciplined typist who doesn't rely on the labels on the keys at all so as not to be confused by them when they're in a different layout.
Back in those days, there were also many edge cases, like the login screen etc., where you couldn't customize your layout away from some default that the client has configured.
Also: Most of the pain comes from curly braces. So when you're doing Python & Nim you're mostly okay using a European layout. I also think it's probably not a coincidence that the people behind those languages are Europeans, Guido van Rossum and Andreas Rumpf.
> As an aside, why why why do people use the international keyboard layout?
Like you said, you'd prefer to keep the keys you need close to the home row. So when a language has extra letters (compared to English), you preferably put those letters in the three letter rows, and carve them space as needed.
I use the default German keyboard layout. Even with dead keys I wouldn't have Nordic characters or the Turkish dotless i and dotted I. I love the Compose key. It's actually making me consider using the US layout because the lack of German glyphs was what was keeping me back.
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