Re:The keyboard layout project
by zokier on Sunday October 28, 2012 @03:23PM
(#4709714)
> good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....)
> quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive)
This is actually very good point. The problem with qwerty is that there is no single qwerty. Almost every country has some weird variation of it (and some countries have several!). This causes problems on two fronts: 1) you need different hardware for every country, which means that niche/high-end keyboards (or laptops etc) become harder to get/use. 2) Software (and programming languages) designed to be used on US layout are pita on national layouts as punctuation etc symbols are shuffled around.
> quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive)
This is actually very good point. The problem with qwerty is that there is no single qwerty. Almost every country has some weird variation of it (and some countries have several!). This causes problems on two fronts: 1) you need different hardware for every country, which means that niche/high-end keyboards (or laptops etc) become harder to get/use. 2) Software (and programming languages) designed to be used on US layout are pita on national layouts as punctuation etc symbols are shuffled around.