Brottweiler’s Logbook

Using the UK keyboard layout

Using a Swedish1 or Nordic keyboard layout all my life and communicating in Swedish on the internet, I am used a Nordic keyboard layout. While with time, I started communicating more in English than Swedish, this wasn't really an issue with a Nordic layout. The main problem was when games said to access the console with the ~/` key, which was supposed to be right under the ESC key. Pressing this key did nothing, since on a Swedish keyboard, the key under ESC has the §/½ symbols. I had no idea that this was different on other layouts. I also had issues typing ` in Markdown, since Swedish keyboards use deadkeys. Disabling deadkeys is a tolerable solution, but grave is used for certain2 swedish words.

The solution to this was to start using an English keyboard layout, like US. The keys are in the wrong places, but with some time I could get used to it. I've used a US layout mainly for several years at this point and I can easily switch between SE and US layouts when needed using ALT + SHIFT. Since then, I've decided to replace the US layout with the UK layout because some keys are in similar places as the SE layout, while keeping all the benefits3 of the US layout.

  1. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangentbord

  2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9#Swedish

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards#Windows_keyboards

#keyboard