Keyboard layout

tl;dr: If you are a Scandinavian programmer, you probably should switch to using the US keyboard layout.

Bored at work so I learned to use QEMU and tried to install Arch Linux (my work machine is a macbook). Everything went well until I noticed that despite setting the correct keymap/layout, I was unable to type the <> symbols with the keyboard. So I tried randomly some other keymap and it was just crazy broken, stuff like “j” mapping to enter and the numbers being on the top letter row. I couldn’t even manage to get back to a clear prompt from the shell “quote mode” so that I might figure out which key was the up arrow so that I could have run a previous layout set command. I aborted the installation and googled a bit to find that it indeed was some weird issue with Apple’s keyboards and there was a fix for Xorg, but I intented to only use the console. Maybe I should just install Xorg. I wouldn’t have minded if it was a bit difficult to type those particular symbols, but trying all the key combinations I couldn’t figure out any way to print them expect to use the default us keymap. I’ve done several linux installs where I used the US keymap a bit, so I’m not actually totally lost with it, but I don’t think I want to learn use it beyond that kind of occasional thing. I knew a guy from a previous company who used the US keymap routinely. I think it was because he had custom mechanical keyboards with that layout.

I thought I was crazy to even consider this, but I switched my keyboard layout to US and I’m immediately loving it! For programming work everything makes so much more sense. You can really tell the C-style syntax was designed for US-like keyboards. I discovered a variant of the US layout which also allows me to type the Scandinavian letters with simple altgr combos, which seems easier than switching layouts. Happily this international variant of the US layout has special characters behind almost every AltGr combo, so it will be very easy to make all kinds of hotkeys in Vim.

I wonder if I’ll know how to type my passwords…

The above led me to permanently adopt US layout for all my computer use.