I ♥ US keyboards

Think about it. If you’re a developer and involved in Open Source projects (or alternatively, if you’re employed by an international organization), most of your natural language communication will be in English and, crucially, everything else will be, well, code or something similar to code (XML, LaTeX, Mathematica, etc.). As it happens, code needs characters such as @, {}, [], \, |, which are easily accessible on a US keyboard but not on localized keyboards because they trade the special characters for umlauts and other language-specific keys.

For instance, on a typical European keyboard, nearly all of those special characters that you need in code have to be typed using the right Alt key (which is called Alt Gr for “alternate graphics”) plus some other key. That not only means you’ll have to leave the home row and resort to finger origami, it also slows you down because you’ll no doubt have to look at the keyboard while typing. (It’s much worse on the Mac because Apple refuses to label the keys with the special character that they’d produce, therefore making people having to guess where things are).

So I ask you, if you’re a developer, what are you going to need more often? Umlauts or those characters that predominate in code? Why make typing the characters you need all the time more difficult than typing the characters you only need occasionally? Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting a radically new keyboard layout. But wouldn’t it make more sense to turn the tables on those umlauts? In other words, what I am suggesting is a hacker-friendly US keyboard, simply enhanced with language-specific characters accessible with Alt Gr.

The German Linux Magazine suggested this several years ago already and showed how to do it for German umlauts on X11. Ever since I’ve been on the Mac, I’ve been using a similar custom keyboard layout (I call it “U.S. German”). It’s a U.S. layout, but it allows me to type umlauts with Option+vowel, ß with Option+s and € with Option+e. I created it with Alex Eulenberg’s excellent keyboard layout generator, starting out with the U.S. layout and blank Option key mappings, and then adding my own mappings like so:

   Oa $00e4  :: auml
  OSa $00c4  :: Auml
   Oo $00f6  :: ouml
  OSo $00d6  :: Ouml
   Ou $00fc  :: uuml
  OSu $00dc  :: Uuml
   Os $00df  :: szlig
   On $00f1  :: ntilde
  OSn $00d1  :: Ntilde
   Oe $20ac  :: euro

After having saved the resulting file properly in OS X’s library path and logging out, I was able to chose the keyboard layout from System Preferences and have used nothing but ever since. Here’s a screenshot of the Keyboard Viewer app when pressing the Option key:

When I originally posted this on my old blog, I got an email from somebody at Aachen University’s Comp. Sci. department who had the same idea, but put a bit more effort in it and produced an even nicer version. So instead of providing my own layout here, I suggest you use the one form their website. Alternatively you could use the generator and come up with your own. I also hear good things about Ukulele, a visual keyboard layout editor. I have no idea about Windows, but I’d be thrilled to hear if people have managed to come up with something for it as well.

Whatever you do, don’t be a slave to your localized keyboard just because you need the occasional umlaut, accent or slashed vowel. There are better ways for us developers. I ♥ US keyboards.

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P.S.: One should note that US keyboards are even physically different (the Return key has different proportions and it lacks a key that European keyboards have). Since you couldn’t buy a Mac in Europe with a physical US layout until recently, my laptop has a physical European layout (which sucks). The physical US layout makes much more sense on a Mac since you can jump through applications with Command+Tab and through windows of a particular application with Command+`, which on a physical US layout is right above the Tab key.