Origin of each country's QWERTY keyboard layout?

[kbdfr]

[…] Indeed. Plenty of the "old" layouts still have the non-combining versions for reasons that were defensible "back in the day", but not anymore... and the layouts don't ever get revised. […]

Ahem… 5 of 16 posts in the following thread just 2 weeks ago were yours:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21484

On the new French layout, ñ is AltGr-n, by the way. Seems reasonable.

[depletedvespene]

[…] Indeed. Plenty of the "old" layouts still have the non-combining versions for reasons that were defensible "back in the day", but not anymore... and the layouts don't ever get revised. […]

Ahem… 5 of 16 posts in the following thread just 2 weeks ago were yours:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21484

That particular layout proposal for the French language changes the extant one (the layout, not the language) so heavily that it qualifies as a new layout, not a revised one (YMWSV).

But even if we decide that is indeed a revised layout, ok, it's one that got a revision. How many more have? Spanish (Spain) was revised in 1997 to add the € symbol and the tilde dead key (incorrectly done, to boot), and... which else has been?

I've actually just checked. Of the "official" layouts IBM defined back in the day (*), a few were revised back in the late '90s (and 2000), to add the euro and not much more than that. From 2001 onwards, only six preexisting layouts have been revised, and of those only the 166W layout (a 166 "UK" extension, for Welsh support, registered in 2006) mentions any dead keys.

The point stands.


(*) There are 92 now, but about a third of them were registered recently, most of them for the benefit of central Asian and south Asian countries.

On the new French layout, ñ is AltGr-n, by the way. Seems reasonable.

For the French national layout, yeah, sure. But Ñ and N̈ (which is what Vometia mentioned) aren't the same.

[vometia]

No, but properly designed layouts do have properly configured diaeresis/umlaut dead key that allows typing the combining code point. I live for the day where Spin̈al Tap demands the Unicode Consortium add the precomposed N̈/n̈ code points.

Compose key for me; except this is my new desktop system and I've forgotten how to get it to use my custom XCompose as usual. Argh. Also Spın̈al Tap, IIRC: three dots is just extravagant!

[depletedvespene]

No, but properly designed layouts do have properly configured diaeresis/umlaut dead key that allows typing the combining code point. I live for the day where Spin̈al Tap demands the Unicode Consortium add the precomposed N̈/n̈ code points.

Compose key for me; except this is my new desktop system and I've forgotten how to get it to use my custom XCompose as usual. Argh. Also Spın̈al Tap, IIRC: three dots is just extravagant!

N̈̇o disagreemen̈̇t there!

[ideus]

Type writers did have dead keys. In Spanish, for example, the acute accent key was a key that produced the accent but did not move the carriage, then, after it any key typed was let to be printed under the accent. That was a dead key by definition.

While we're at this, one thing that does not cease to strike me is how strong the aversion to dead keys is in people from some countries, while in others they're heavily used with no second thought - both the Portuguese (Portugal) and Spanish (Spain) layouts have five (two on the base layer, two more on the Shift layer and one under AltGr) of 'em, while layouts from some neighboring countries go to quite the length to avoid them (the dead keys, I mean).

Swedish keyboard has two full dead keys, one is dedicated for acute and grave accents, the other is for dieresis, circumflex accent and tilde. Best implementation of dead keys I have found so far in a modern KB layout. Others have regular characters and dead keys all mixed on several different keys. Like US International for example. One additional nicety of the SW layout is that the apostrophe/single quote and double quotes are independent non dead keys: It is perfect.

[depletedvespene]

Type writers did have dead keys. In Spanish, for example, the acute accent key was a key that produced the accent but did not move the carriage, then, after it any key typed was let to be printed under the accent. That was a dead key by definition.

While we're at this, one thing that does not cease to strike me is how strong the aversion to dead keys is in people from some countries, while in others they're heavily used with no second thought - both the Portuguese (Portugal) and Spanish (Spain) layouts have five (two on the base layer, two more on the Shift layer and one under AltGr) of 'em, while layouts from some neighboring countries go to quite the length to avoid them (the dead keys, I mean).

Swedish keyboard has two full dead keys, one is dedicated for acute and grave accents, the other is for dieresis, circumflex accent and tilde. Best implementation of dead keys I have found so far in a modern KB layout. Others have regular characters and dead keys all mixed on several different keys. Like US International for example. One additional nicety of the SW layout is that the apostrophe/single quote and double quotes are independent non dead keys: It is perfect.

There's indeed rather little to criticize in the Swedish layout — its only real deficiency is the lack of the backquote (`) and the non-combining tilde (~) and caret (^) characters, the three of which see heavy usage among programmers. Of course, it could be revised to add a select few "new" letters and symbols for the benefit of neighboring countries: Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ẞ and Ʒ, as well as symbols like —, ×, ÷ (and a few others) could be added to the AltGr layer with quite little fuss and without needing to alter the extant assignments.

And N̈̇. Just because.

[Findecanor]

In Swedish/Finnish layout, at least under Linux, Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ß and × are available with Alt Gr on A, Ö, T, D, S and * respectively, and µ on Alt Gr-M of course. These mappings are all very straightforward.
If you have enabled the Compose key, you could use that to create — and ÷ . A decent word processor should auto-translate --- to — though.

[ideus]

I recalled that I saw somewhere an "international" SW/FI layout expanded to include all those characters. I am currently using it to write in SP between other languages and I added ñÑ, ¡ and ¿ to it. Very easy to customize with Win 10's own keyboard utility. I am sure any additional symbol beyond what is already included would be very easy to add. One additional benefit is that most symbols are located in familiar places for SP-LA and SP layout users.The back-quote is easily produced with the grave accent plus space (`), as well as the non combining tilde (~) and caret (^). I use them when writing R scripts and TEX.

[vometia]

There's indeed rather little to criticize in the Swedish layout — its only real deficiency is the lack of the backquote (`) and the non-combining tilde (~) and caret (^) characters, the three of which see heavy usage among programmers. Of course, it could be revised to add a select few "new" letters and symbols for the benefit of neighboring countries: Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ẞ and Ʒ, as well as symbols like —, ×, ÷ (and a few others) could be added to the AltGr layer with quite little fuss and without needing to alter the extant assignments.

Curiously enough, I use ` very rarely: in shell-scripting I prefer $(...) as it tends to be more obvious, especially on print-outs where the fonts may not differentiate between the various single-quote types. Kinda dating myself there, it was a frequent problem in the early '90s where laser printer fonts came on expensive cartridges! And occasionally SQL, even though just the idea of using it makes me wilt.

I occasionally type Portuguese as a Brazilian friend speaks no English and I'm even more clueless going the other way so I rely on online translators; as not everything is amenable to cut-and-paste I end up manually typing some of it myself. And as much as I love the compose key most of the time, typing ã is laborious and almost guaranteed to cause a typo. In cases like that I can see the attraction of dead-keys. Dedicated (hurr, deadicated) ones, that is, I find the already-mentioned habit of turning `, " etc into dead-keys to be more irritating than useful.

And N̈̇. Just because.

Well, of course!

[depletedvespene]

There's indeed rather little to criticize in the Swedish layout — its only real deficiency is the lack of the backquote (`) and the non-combining tilde (~) and caret (^) characters, the three of which see heavy usage among programmers. Of course, it could be revised to add a select few "new" letters and symbols for the benefit of neighboring countries: Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ẞ and Ʒ, as well as symbols like —, ×, ÷ (and a few others) could be added to the AltGr layer with quite little fuss and without needing to alter the extant assignments.

Curiously enough, I use ` very rarely: in shell-scripting I prefer $(...) as it tends to be more obvious, especially on print-outs where the fonts may not differentiate between the various single-quote types. Kinda dating myself there, it was a frequent problem in the early '90s where laser printer fonts came on expensive cartridges! And occasionally SQL, even though just the idea of using it makes me wilt.

I agree with you in this regard. In fact, in the custom dye-sub job I commissioned recently, I asked for a 1-point font size increase for the backquote and all the (non-angled) the quotation marks for this very reason.

As a matter of fact, I'm on record that had I had my way with early ASCII, the backquote character would have NOT been included (thus ridding ourselves from that pest, and allowing a better character to serve the `` function).

I occasionally type Portuguese as a Brazilian friend speaks no English and I'm even more clueless going the other way so I rely on online translators; as not everything is amenable to cut-and-paste I end up manually typing some of it myself. And as much as I love the compose key most of the time, typing ã is laborious and almost guaranteed to cause a typo. In cases like that I can see the attraction of dead-keys. Dedicated (hurr, deadicated) ones, that is, I find the already-mentioned habit of turning `, " etc into dead-keys to be more irritating than useful.

I agree with that, too.

And N̈̇. Just because.

Well, of course!

Would N̤̣̈̇ be too much?

[Rauha]

In Swedish/Finnish layout, at least under Linux, Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ß and × are available with Alt Gr on A, Ö, T, D, S and * respectively, and µ on Alt Gr-M of course. These mappings are all very straightforward.
If you have enabled the Compose key, you could use that to create — and ÷ . A decent word processor should auto-translate --- to — though.

Sounds like your Linux install uses Finnish Multilingual layout (SFS 5966/Laajennettu suomalainen näppäimistö/ finländsk mångspråkig tangentbordsuppsättnin).

All of those Alt Gr+ combos work in it, but not in the standard swedish/finnish layout. EDIT: I mean those alphabeticals (Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ß). µ is of course on the standard layout.

[Findecanor]

In Swedish/Finnish layout, at least under Linux, Æ, Ø, Þ, Ð, ß and × are available with Alt Gr on A, Ö, T, D, S and * respectively, and µ on Alt Gr-M of course. These mappings are all very straightforward.
If you have enabled the Compose key, you could use that to create — and ÷ . A decent word processor should auto-translate --- to — though.

Sounds like your Linux install uses Finnish Multilingual layout (SFS 5966/Laajennettu suomalainen näppäimistö/ finländsk mångspråkig tangentbordsuppsättnin).

I use Ubuntu Mate, which is a fairly mainstream distro. I had only chosen "Swedish" keyboard during installation, and then options for "Caps Lock is a also a Control"* and "Position of Compose Key:Menu" afterwards.

Swedish.jpg (138.75 KiB) Viewed 2929 times

* Control instead of Caps Lock does not show up in the map. Maybe I did something wrong, I dunno. I have it mapped to Control also in firmware
* My Media keys mappings on PrtSc, ScrLk and Pause do not show up either...
Edit: Hey look: ÷ is there on Alt Gr+Shift+7 !