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
Before 90s "Polish typist's layout" was more popular, it was based on QWERTZ and had the <>?/[]();: signs moved out of the way to put Polish letters there.

All typing machines used it, but it was awful for programming obviously, so the "Polish programmer's layout" was added, and because it was exactly the same as standard american QWERTY (except for Left Alt + some letters) it won almost overnight.

Windows still shipped with both layouts enabled for Polish locale for decades, and nobody used the typis one, but there was a shortcut that changed between them.

When you accidentally used that shortcut - if you had Y or Z or Polish letters in your password - you couldn't log in (because you typed "yeti" but got "zeti" but it still looked like * * * * :) )

I think there must have been millions of USD lost on support calls because of that little shortcut :)

>>ajuc+cL
I think a misunderstanding occured here: AltGr is actually the right Alt key. The left one is the regular Alt.

If I remember correctly shortcuts to change layout/language are by default Ctrl+Shift and Alt+Shift respectively (correct me if I'm wrong). These are incredibly annoying, especially in some games. Luckily though you can disable them from the settings. Instead there's Win+Space, which is a Godsend and should've always been the only default.

Fun fact: on Windows Polish programmer's keyboard you can use the Tilde key (Shift+Grave) to input Polish characters as well, e.g. press Shift+Grave (it won't put in any symbol at this point), release and then press 's' to input 'ś'. However it makes it problematic to input the tilde symbol itself, so I've modified my layout with the MS Keyboard Layout Creator to get rid of that functionality/flaw (aside from other minor improvements) https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=22339

>>Techni+X01
Right, it's the right alt, not left:) It's muscle memory to the point I had to check myself doing it to be sure :)

The shortcut to change was definitely something with Ctrl and Shift because I remember accidently switching layout when I was selecting text by whole words with Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right.

Tilde works funny on linux - it makes alternative version of every letter, not only from the current locale. I was accused of being a Russian pretending to be Polish on some Polish forum long ago because I wrote something with a Greek (or cyrylic?) letter by accident because I did something with home directory in the background and only pressed ~ once instead of twice :)