Coding on a German keyboard suddenly gives you a reason to like those indentation-based languages without curly braces. And what about backticks and single quotes, they're for sure easier to find on an American ASCII keyboard. Fücking ümläüt chäräctersß!
Even worse on a Mac where it's not even printed on the keys what they do when holding shift, alt, or apple/clover/cringle keys.

US

The good ol' AltGr hand destructor 3000

Yeah it's not great but you do get used to it

German

I don't mind it much, muscle memory.

I get that.
But by now it's just muscle memory and takes about exactly the same amount of time. Also most IDEs automatically place/close curly brackets for you.

What annoys me the most is keybinds. For example the (often) default keybind of ctrl+/ to comment something out is literally impossible on a german keyboard. It always ends up being ctrl+shift+7. Not all editors recognize that as being correct.

On mac I rebound { } to option Ü +
And [ ] to option Ä #

It took me just a few days to get used to it (after many years of coding with {}[] on a standard german layout on Windows)

Now I consider changing that on Windows as well, if I ever want to code on it again.

@Lensflare that sounds smart tbh.
i was thinking of just getting a US layout keyboard and using that for coding. since i comment everything in english anyways, i wouldn't need Umlauts

But at the end of the day... yeah you get used to it..

I'm absolutely used to the layout so I don't really see any problems with it (and I write mostly C++)

Though I do know some German devs who use other layouts mainly because of programming. One of em even uses Dvorak but I feel like that's a different rabbit hole...

Are all German keyboards this crusty?

@MammaNeedHummus yes because all German keyboards have been used as plates for eating bratwurst. You should know that, you uncivilised kumquat.

@electrineer and if you see spills on german keyboards, you'll find that it stems from eating the Sauerkraut on there.

I had to use an US keyboard for 1 hour to convince myself that it's easier to switch layouts all the time and learn the US layout than it is to use a HU keyboard for programming.

HU is a derivative of DE with the weird symbols swapped out for other weird symbols.

@MammaNeedHummus Ach, I sometimes forget if the ß key stands for Brezel or Bratwurst or if it's a "sharp s" for Sauerkraut. Then I just try all of them.

@usr--2ndry 😂 Sauerkraut doesn’t have a scharf s though

Also the semicolon is just one keystroke on an US layout, maybe that's why it was used on so many programming languages as sentence separator.

@cafecortado too many symbols need multi-finger acrobatics: braces, brackets, slash, backslash, single quotes, double quotes.

@Lensflare changing bindings might be an option, at least better than the idea of changing the language syntax (I think you could in Perl and in some vintage Microsoft BASIC version).

@MammaNeedHummus it goes on:

ü is for Dürüm,

ö is for Döner,

but there is no ş key for Şiş Kebap, unfortunately.

@usr--2ndry use cyrillic:

Шiш Kebap

🙃

@Lensflare that reads like sheesh kevar though it should be шиш кебаб

Foreign languages are much easier to type on my mobile. I love switching virtual soft keyboard in that (kebab) case!

Try writing HTML on it! Its cursed!

yeah, HTML and markdown on Android soft keyboard having to switch and search for angular brackets, curly braces, and backticks

@usr--2ndry what maniac would try to code on a phone with a soft keyboard?

I mean, except for "cool hackers" in movies…

@Lensflare idk, a programming-language-specific soft keyboard could be kinda nice actually. The main view could have buttons for variables that are in scope and generic stuff like loops and whatnot. It could drop you into a normal keyboard only when you need to write a new name for something.

@electrineer that’s what Playgrounds on the iPad does, actually. It was awkward for me to code in it still, though.