zlacker

>>ekianj+(OP)
Oh my god...is that a 15" laptop without a number pad being crammed onto the side of the keyboard, thus not forcing all my typing to be awkwardly offset and uncomfortable?

>>XorNot+n9
While a personally agree with you thoroughly, this weekend I learned that Thai people love number pads because the language has too many characters and it's own numerals, yet most of the time people use/prefer Arabic numerals, so with a number pad they have access to the numbers without having to swap keyboard layouts to English just for numerals.

>>toasta+Ob
It's the same with the French, every French person I know is using the number pad a lot when typing on a French layout. The reason being that in the usual top row you have the accented characters and for numbers you have to press shift, so it's easier to use the number pad. As a side note the French keyboard layout is one of the worst to use if you are not French. Typing your password at an Internet cafe can be a real pain.

>>cycoma+sj
How many accented characters are there in French?

In Polish we have 9 such characters and most people use just so called "programmers keyboard layout" which uses left-alt + letter to do the accent.

E.g. alt + e = ę, alt + l = ł (with a one case where we have two different accents for a single letter: z, so we use alt+z = ż and alt+x = ź, the second letter is less commonly used then the first one)

20-30 years ago there were some strange keyboard layouts that didn't use alt, but hopefully they were forgotten.

>>krzyk+Kk
On the AZERTY keyboard there's éèàç (I know ç is not technically an accent) and the circonflexe and tréma accents as dead keys. This is apparently enough to cause massive confusion on QWERTY keyboards and for everyone to accept discarding accents on uppercase letters (ÉÀÇ). Also it's apparently advantageous enough to accept pushing []{} to silly alt combinations.

Some people move to BÉPO or something like that, I use QWERTY with Xcompose.