I've used a US-QWERTY keyboard layout my entire life. I've seen other layouts that do things like reduce the size of the enter/backspace keys, move the pipe operator (|) and can't wrap my head around how I would code on those.
What are your experiences? Are there any layouts that you prefer for coding over US English? Are there any symbols that you have a hard time reaching ($ for example)?
Swedish layout. Not ideal for coding (too many things like curly and square brackets etc are under altgr. And tilde and backtick are on dead keys.
But switching back and forth as soon as you need to write Swedish (for the letters åäö) is just too much work. And yes, in the Swedish alphabet they are separate letters, not aao with diacretics.
I'm swedish and I use EurKEY. It's basically US but makes it possible to use Å/Ä/Ö through altgr + W/A/O. I don't write that much swedish so I'm not too bothered, meanwhile the coding advantage is huge for
' " \ | / ? | [ ] { }.Win + space to swap is so fast and simple especially when it also swaps for you when switching apps
I have the same problem in German (ä, ö, ü and ß), and I've resigned to using US layout with caps lock mapped as compose key. But then again, I code more than I write texts
In polish we have ź and ż. For ż we use Alt gr + z, and for ź we use Alt gr + x. Same for other non-standard letters. The rest of the keyboard is a regular US layout.
So in Swedish you could use Alt gr + a and Alt gr + s for different variants of a.