[soco]

I never thought it was something special to type English on a Swiss keyboard. Do people switch keyboards when they switch languages? To me it seems an unnecessary hassle, to remember where's the Z or why aren't there umlauts or or or, whenever I send an email to another person in a different language.

[samus]

German is so similar to english that switching is not really a thing. It's mostly programmers that do it to have easier access to punctuation and brackets. Frankly, I cannot understand why the Z and Y were swapped in the first place.

German keyboards are just flexible enough for writing the odd french or spanish loanword. Other languages pretty much always require specific keyboard layouts.

Edit: The [Neo2 and Bone](https://neo-layout.org/) layouts make it possible to easily type in most latin-based writing systems.

[pdpi]

As a native Portuguese speaker, I don't have a need for umlauts, but do need easy access to the tilde, acute, grave, and circumflex. English is the odd one out, because it's the least common denominator in terms of the characters you need.

[qw]

Even though the characters are mostly the same for most European languages, the mobile keyboard is often tightly connected to spell checking and auto correct for a specific language. It can be a struggle to "fight" the autocorrect when using the wrong keyboard.

Physical keyboards don't have the same issues.

[soco]

I never found autocorrect reliable - at least in Android keyboards (both Gboard and Samsung) - so I learned to always keep that deactivated. Swiping is the only place where keyboard layout would matter to me, so indeed virtual keyboards make sense to match the input. Physical don't have swiping (yet?) so I'll stick with the one with umlauts and never bother to change the input keyboard - although Windows keeps insisting after updates.