At my company here in Switzerland there is a mix of layouts in use, so support are used to switching back and forth -- but in France, I was just about the only one using QWERTY.
I remapped my keyboard to the French Canadian layout and it used to drive my support department crazy. When they would take remote control of my PC, they would struggle to reconcile what they were typing on their (AZERTY) keyboard with what was coming out on the screen!
to access the networks in other places is no problem. I accessed Swiss networks from internet-cafés in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, Moscow, Malta and Milano without any problems. Your "typing" is automatically converted.
What is the point about a Swiss-German keyboard ? It allows you to use
äöü and éàèâç plus $£ and {}[] as well as ñ !
So, when going onto holidays I send some messages to myself containing all these things so that I can copy-paste them down into any new text.
in which case, i amended my original post
if you use the one true editor (VIM) then you can get those characters more logically using the digraph function e.g. to get ë, you type e:, to get ñ, you type n~.
also for some reason, linux maps stupid extra chars to alt-gr and shift-alt-gr combinations, allowing you to type these:
@łe¶ŧ←↓→øþæßðđŋħjĸł«»¢“”nμ·
/.EΩŁEΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞƧÐaŊĦ
J&Ł<>©‘’Noס1⁄8£1⁄43⁄85⁄87⁄8TM±°¿
|1|¡|123€1⁄2123€1⁄23⁄4{[]}\1⁄8£1⁄43⁄85⁄87⁄8TM±
Is this supposed to be irony? I mean, taking into account your whopper of a first post .
On keyboards, the love of my life is the International English keyboard setting. You can adjust your computer's keyboard settings to make it think you've got all kinds of keyboards hooked up to it. Right now I've got simple US settings set up - I'm seeing QWERTZ and typing QWERTY! (I'm flying blind!) As soon as I get a real QWERTY keyboard I'm taking the next step and switching over to the International English setup. With that system you type the accent first, " or ~ or whatever and then the letter, a or e or i or c etc and out pops the umlauted character in question. When typing in English I don't need to look at all those pesky extra characters, and when I need one I know where to find it.
all very nice but people here prefer to have the characters quite directly just as they are, and not through a weird indirect approach coming from an insular country in the Northwest ! as we here regard ö ä ü as normal letters and not as something special, which has to be ONE character and not two.
and again back to the question about the keyboards, I have used quite different keyboards in Milano Moscow Beirut Cairo Alexandria Tunis and after some 10 minutes got it. I simply fail to understand why people find it so difficult to use different systems.
I had endless discussions with a Norwegian correspondent who got almost irrational about the point that his shrewd Norwegian writing was not respected in our publication. I in vain explained to him some 97 times in 12 years that those characters were not available in our keyboards nor the ones of our British partners. And that my partner in London and me had worked out tricks to overcome the problems in French and German and Spanish but had to surrender with Scandinavian and East European languages.
Well let's just take your example of the Norwegian. If he is regularly typing in Norwegian and needs special characters that are not available on a QWERTZ keyboard, why should he adapt to a solution that does not meet his needs? Along the same lines, why should those of us who type most regularly in English (or French or whatever) downgrade to a keyboard setup that is impractical?
Keyboards are just tools - you always want to use the best tool for the job. They are not some kind of indication of your integration into a country!
I use a QWERTY keyboard at work and on my MacBook, and a (Swiss-German) QWERTZ keyboard on my XP work machine at home, and although it took a few weeks, I learned to switch between them pretty smoothly. I think folks' minds can be "wired" a bit differently, however, so maybe not everyone can make that adaptation.
As a bit of related trivia, I noticed somewhere along the line that when you mis-type www.amayon.com , you still end up at www.amazon.com . (Somebody was paying attention!)
well, they are not normal letters! you have to press shift and letter to get capital letters, so i prefer having these rarely used letters have longer key combinations at the expense of more useful keys.
unless 'pretty smoothly' means now never typing Y instead of Z or vice versa, and also maintaining the same typing speed, to me, it's not worth the effort of learning the new layout.
put it this way, if the brake and accelerate pedals were the wrong way around in a car but labelled brake and accelerate as appropriate, would you rather learn this new system, or use a feature which swaps the functions back to normal but keeps them labelled incorrectly?
I had a QWERTY at work until I got a 3rd monitor, and the IT guy "helpfully" replaced my keyboard with a QWERTZ. But I use it in UK layout.
On-call laptop is QWERTZ. But I use it in UK layout.
Home keyboard (iMac) is QWERTZ. I use it in Swiss German layout because I don't do much Unix at home, and I'm trying to integrate.
Because I do Unix at work, I can't bring myself to switch to these incantations for 3 of the most common Unix characters.
/ = \ = | = I mean, come on! Yet my Swiss German colleagues seem happy to press multiple keys and don't understand how I can do Unix on a normal keyboard.
yeah, using common symbols such as: \ / - _ ; # ~ is a bit of a bugger on some layouts.
For him, the Norwegian keyboard is necessary, as you cannot match the very important special accent of Norwegian writing with German, French or British keyboards. This of course may be subject to change. But the partner in London was a computer man (programming, internet, etc) and knew his stuff quite well. The correspondent in Czechia at the other hand understood quite well that Czech accents could simply not be written here, as he and his mother beside Czech keyboards also used British and German keyboards and so knew exactly what was possible and what was not. Our British partner btw. developed a program which automatically transformed äüö etc from our transfer to him into the British asci and another system to transform data into Windows.
Well, here they ARE normal letters, and are permanently used when writing in German. This is why Remington in the late 19th Century when they started to provide Germany, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland with typewriters, re-modelled the keyboards in order to meet the German language requirements.
I got, at age 13, an 1898 Remington typewriter from my grandmother, which had Swiss-German qwertz keys, and when some 30 years older looked a bit like THIS one here :
and had it in use between 1963 and 1968, when I got, as a birthday present, a top modern "Gabriele"
pictured here :
I switched to Swiss years ago, and I'm totally comfortable with it as a touch typist.
Just started a remote contract for a UK company and have one of their laptops. It was horrible until I got a nice Swiss usb one for it.
Agree with the first part, but not the second. I do prefer the Swiss. (better than the German) At least, if you're working internationally it is better. The accented and umlaut keys are nicely accessible, and I can even do square brackets [without needing to look at my fingers]. I do wish the ~ didn't require an Alt-Gr and then pressing the space bar to get.
I use a UK keyboard here at work. Sadly my BlackBerry has a QWERTZ keyboard and there is nothing you can do to change it.
Can someone tell me where to find the # sign on a Swiss keyboard?
thnx,
fduvall
AltGr + 3
this message is too short
How do I get a capital ö ?
I have a laptop with a Swiss keyboard.
The key itself looks like
éö~
öé
And combinations of Shift Alt, AltGr etc give:
ö
Shift ö gives é
Alt ö gives
Alt Gr ö gives
Ctrl ö gives
press "Caps Lock" first and then the Ö button.
Those umlauts on a PC:
ü = Alt+129
ä = Alt+132
ö = Alt+148
Ü = Alt+154
Ö = Alt+0214
Ä = Alt+0196
go figure with the French accents:
à = Alt+133
â = Alt+131
ç = Alt+135
é = Alt+130
è = Alt+138
ë = Alt+137
ê = Alt+136
ï = Alt+139
Now, I'm mainly using a Mac on a US keyboard, so it's a fiddle having to use the Character Viewer and selecting each individual foreign key which then only appears as a squiggle on PCs anyway. Anyone have a cure for that?