I moved to Iceland a year ago, and brought my PC and my laptop with me. I am confounded by icelandic (nordic in general) keyboards. I can understand their use for a non-technical person, but even keys such as @ are obscured behind "Alt Gr" which is a secondary right side only alt-key? And the position of braces, brackets, and parantheses is also clearly an afterthought. Obviously, years of muscle memory are hard to replace, so I've continued to use my US keyboards.
But there's a problem. I want to spell people and places' names correctly, and on my PC that means I have to swap input locales often in order to type proper icelandic characters like ð, ö, þ, æ, í etc. This is annoyingly hard on a keyboard that doesn't support them natively! I will give apple some credit here - it's incredibly easy and intuitive to type foreign characters on a US keyboard just by holding down 'i' for example, if you only occasionally need to use them. Windows requires you to either learn the old-school way of holding alt, and typing the ascii code on the number pad, or hot-swap input languages. I know German uses far fewer unique characters, but how do you cope with that problem when you need German characters like.. sharp S, oumlaut, etc?
But there's a problem. I want to spell people and places' names correctly, and on my PC that means I have to swap input locales often in order to type proper icelandic characters like ð, ö, þ, æ, í etc. This is annoyingly hard on a keyboard that doesn't support them natively! I will give apple some credit here - it's incredibly easy and intuitive to type foreign characters on a US keyboard just by holding down 'i' for example, if you only occasionally need to use them. Windows requires you to either learn the old-school way of holding alt, and typing the ascii code on the number pad, or hot-swap input languages. I know German uses far fewer unique characters, but how do you cope with that problem when you need German characters like.. sharp S, oumlaut, etc?