[anon4]

Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants. The typewriter one is a direct translation from the layout used on typewriters, which usually is well thought out. The phonetic one just assigns keys to their phonetic latin equivalents or when there's no equivalent, to a letter that kind of looks like it, or is just free. Since cyrillic has more letters than latin, you lose the `, [, and ] keys (at least in Bulgarian phonetic). All keyboards sold here have two letters on each key - one for the US layout and one for the typewriter layout. And still the majority of people prefer to just use the phonetic layout simply because it works with their existing muscle memory. For a while the most popular Windows 95 and XP program was FlexType - it let you type cyrillic letters using the phonetic layout back when Windows only had the typewriter layout available.

[otabdeveloper]

> Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants.

No, only Bulgaria uses the (insane, IMO) 'phonetic cyrillic qwerty' keyboard layout.