Shanghai Bob

Although I’ve dropped out of working life for the moment, I still spend time online almost every day (not just updating this blog!). My online life is made more interesting and effective by the German keyboard.

This bit of gibberish:

siteÖwikipedia Äqwertz kezboardÄ

Is what you get as an American touch-typist pounding out the following google search:

site:wikipedia “qwerty keyboard”

After a few weeks in London, I got used to most of the English keyboard’s quirks. These consist mainly of swapping @ and “, and adding the £ key where Americans are used to the #. One quirk shared by the English and German keyboards is the slightly larger Enter key that has metastasized to engulf the forward slash+pipe key. *NIX users typing something like “rmdir ./tmp/old_files/” tend to panic when the first forward slash is accidentally converted into an execute.

But the German keyboard seems slightly more unfriendly to the average internet user than the American or British keyboard setup. The @ symbol, for example, is written with right-alt+q, which is fairly inconvenient for something you type frequently in email, and the forward slash is in the number range, a little out of reach. These criticisms might be unfair: If email address protocol had been developed by someone working on a German keyboard, the @ might have been replaced with something more readily to hand, like ä, which you don’t even need the shift key to produce on a qwertz keyboard.

But the most troublesome difference is the smallest one, namely the swapping of the y and z keys. It not only requires a kind of double-think each time you want to type one of those characters, but because Undo is mapped to Ctl-z, when you get something wrong, your attempt to Undo it gets translated into Repeat.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under travel.