[encom]

This curse extends to mechanical keyboards as well. There exists all sorts of fancy, beautiful and odd keycap sets... for Americans. Some times for German and French. If I get really lucky, I'll find some with a "Nordic" layout, which is an abomination that combines dk/se/no.

[gunalx]

Not a us user, but ended up with us and uk layout, just because they where easier to find. (also works fine for programming)

[encom]

Yea, the danish layout is objectively terrible[1], but I have many decades of muscle memory with it now...

[1] Shift+7 == /, AltGr+¨ == ~. These two in particular are tedious as a Linux user.

[dontlaugh]

The solution is to get blank keycaps. Then it doesn’t matter.

[eterm]

It does matter, because the phyiscal keys themselves are literally in different places.

Comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1DL1fO6Zs

Note that weird abomination of a backslash key around the enter key on the US keyboard.

There's no way to just map the US keyboard to the UK one.

[dontlaugh]

Sure, I’m familiar with the weird UK layout.

[jenadine]

It is the US layout that stands out. The UK layout follows ISO 9995, which most other countries also follow.

[wpm]

And I thank god every day we don't. The ISO keyboard is awful. Left shift is too important of a key to be 1u. I don't need a massive enter key that lives on two rows. Just insane choices.

[dontlaugh]

The big enter key I do like.

But I’ve ended up using a split keyboard where every key is 1u. All language layouts map to the physical layout in basically the same way.

[happymellon]

UK is fine.

Mac UK is shit.

[dontlaugh]

It’s certainly a matter of opinion. I dislike the UK layout, except on macs where it’s just about ok.

[happymellon]

They hide # behind additional key combination, and expose §.

It's awful.

[adrian_b]

I use a Dvorak-based layout on Qwerty keyboards, so in normal usage they could as well have blank keycaps.

Despite that, the Qwerty keycaps remain useful for me, because my keyboards are not programmable, so the key mapping is done by the operating system. When I have to unlock the computer with a password, after booting, the keyboard still works as Qwerty and the keycaps help me in entering the password, because nowadays I touch-type only on Dvorak, while on Qwerty I must return to hunt-and-peck, as there are many years since I stopped using Qwerty.

So only because of this password entering, I prefer to not have blank keycaps, even if I ignore them in normal usage.

[encom]

Kind of true, but it's an aesthetics issue as well. The doubleshot keycaps look so nice :)