[awelxtr]

Spaniard here.

I've done it all my life. Maybe my pain tolerance is way higher?

Edit: I don't know what's wrong with pressing several keys at once to do something. It is like complaining that piano has no individual keys for all the possible chords. What's the alternative? Pressing a single key? What would you be doing with the rest of your fingers anyway?

[AlbertoGP]

I’m also Spanish, living in Germany: the Spanish keyboard is actually rather nice, with it it’s easy to type Spanish, German, French, Italian etc. without even changing the layout. It’s even easier to type French than on a French azerty keyboard, but that’s a particularly bad one.

The German and Swedish keyboards mentioned above are rather bad for programming (in the German case, even for typing ß/ss): they have AltGr combinations at the top row, the numbers 7, 8, 9, 0 for instance to get the brackets and braces {, [, ], }. In the Spanish keyboard they are right of P and Ñ (; in US-English) and those positions are much easier to reach while pressing AltGr.

In addition, in the Spanish keyboard the plain Latin letters are in the standard qwerty positions.

After having had to deal with some terrible keyboard layouts over the years I’ve come to appreciate the Spanish one very much. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into designing it.

[marginalia_nu]

The problem is that you need to press multiple keys with the same hand. Typically when touch-typing you press modifier keys with the other hand, to avoid having to move the hand in awkward ways, or typing with the left hand on the right side of the keyboard or some other weird solution.

On top of that, alt+7 is spectacularly awkward, as you need to curl one finger really aggressively and extend another to reach both keys.

Many of these keys are indeed accessible with a single keypress in US QWERTY. That, or a simple shift-combination. They're also much closer to the letter keys across the board.