[Normille]

Important to note there are two 'flavours' [with a fecking U!] of English. So, even if you're a native English speaker, it can be almost as frustrating, as most programming languages are written in US English. So, if you're the kind of person who takes a pride in your spelling and grammar, there's the constant thorn in the brain of having to deliberately spell words wrongly all the time, such as needing to write:

color instead of colour

center --------> centre

math ----------> maths

And then these new-fangled languages [like Crystal] come along and add to the misery with their:

fiber ---------> fibre

[GianFabien]

With non USA keyboards some punctuation characters are much harder to type or even non-existent.

[Normille]

One thing I really like about Apple keyboards is that they make it really easy to type a lot of accented letters and characters, using just the ALT key.

Usually [with UK layout anyway] ALT+E followed by the vowel you need will give you an accent on that vowel; acute on E, umlaut on O and U, etc.

I use Irish layout which is the same as UK but has the additional advantage [for the languages I need to type] that I can type acute accented vowels with just ALT+vowel: áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ Thus saving an extra keystroke. Some other handy ones:

ALT + s gives you German ß

ALT + n followed by another n gives you Spanish ñ

ALT + c followed by another c gives you French ç

ALT + ! gives you Spanish ¡

[oddly, on my keyboard ALT + ? doesn't give the Spanish upside down question mark, but a division sign]

ALT + g gives you copyright symbol ©

ALT + r gives you registered trademark symbol ®

ALT + k gives you a degrees symbol ˚

ALT + t gives you square root symbol √

ALT + y gives you a Yen [?] symbol ¥

ALT + f gives you a florin symbol ƒ

ALT + h gives you a mu symbol µ

ALT + l gives you pi π

etc. etc.

[jfengel]

That's interesting. Can you give some examples?