[pdpi]

English keyboards (especially ANSI-style US English keyboards) are very popular, but that's largely a matter of historical availability and (in hacker circles) bad support for the sort of punctuation you use for programming.

Flip it on its head then — would you want to type English on a Cyrillic keyboard?

Even just sticking to Latin alphabet keyboard layouts, there's plenty of variations that make different keyboards quite inconvenient for the wrong language — Spanish and Portuguese are very similar languages, yet you wouldn't want to write Spanish using a Portuguese layout (You can probably type ñ, but I don't think there's a way to type ¿ and ¡ directly).

I use the US International layout because it's "good enough" to write Portuguese while being a lot more convenient for programming, but the standard US English layout is completely unusable for me, and for most European languages, which tend to have a variety of diacritics. Even on US International, I can type umlauts (ä) but have no idea how to type Hungarian double acute marks (a̋).

[MagnumOpus]

There is no way to type Hungarian double acute accents on US International or UK Extended keyboards. You have to use workarounds like copy/paste, Alt-codes, or substitution macros.

(Also, there is no double acute a in Hungarian, only o and u.)

[pdpi]

Thanks for the correction. I knew Hungarian used double acutes in some vowels, and should've looked up which ones instead of picking one at random.

[imbnwa]

Portuguese seems to have held onto a lot of medieval spellings and pronounciations as I notice Spanish and Portuguese use to pronounce Juan/João similiarly at some point in the middle ages, is this accurate?

[pdpi]

I'm not super familiar with that particular bit of language history, but AIUI nasal vowels/diphthongs are just weird. The way we both pronounce and spell them seems to have evolved a fair bit. Joam and Joaõ are both obsolete spellings of the name, so I can only imagine that the spelling was closer to Spanish before and we've diverged more than they have.

[em-bee]

on linux compose = o and compose = u do the trick: őű

(a̋ is not hungarian and doesn't work)