* Posts by Marcus Hook

2 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2008

Customers give Dell the finger over keyboard screw-up

Marcus Hook
Coat

more suggested keyboard layout revisions

OK, so programmers use some of the obscure symbols like | and {} on a regular basis. This discussion board is obviously geek-heavy, but overall I'd imagine only a tiny proportion of keyboard-users are programmers.

While we're discussing possible reorganizing of the keyboard ... Do people still use the F1...F12 keys? Personally I will occasionally hit F1 as a quick way to call up Help, and will use F5 on my company's laptop to turn the projector display on during presentations, but I haven't touched F2-F4 or F6-F12 in years.

For that matter, I find PrntScrn quite useful but haven't touched Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Home, or End in years. Do people still use those?

Marcus Hook
Coat

Revising American keyboards

What I want to know is, why is it so friggin' difficult to type a Spanish n with a ~ sign above it or vowels with accents above them? I am an English-speaking US resident, and even though I don't use it terribly often there are times when I want to insert a Spanish word into an English sentence and find it difficult to do so. Given the growing Hispanic population in the US and the growing phenomenon of Spanish or Spanglish words making their way into American vernacular, there is increasing demand for those symbols.

There are certainly plenty of other symbols that can be eliminated. Honestly, how many people still use the ^ | ` { } symbols on a regular-enough basis for them to deserve valuable piece of permanent real estate on the standard keyboard?

Perhaps American laptops should just come with a "European" key, which when pressed in conjunction with another key produces the European equivalent. so, shift-n produces "N" and euro-n produces "n~"; shift-4 produces "$" and euro-4 produces the Euro currency symbol, euro-e produces an e with an accent, etc. Not perfect, and doesn't help with obscurer European languages like Norwegian, but saves a lot of time when typing French or English words.

By the way, you want to see a really freaky keyboard, try taking a look at an Israeli keyboard. That keyboard is jam packed because it has to have both English and Hebrew alphabets, not to mention Hebrew is right-to-left so everything is back-asswards. Even the Start key (and Start menu) is on the right instead of the left.