RE: [OT] Keyboards (was: American English translation of character names)

[Arcane Jill]

Yeh, £ is <shift 3> in Britain, right where # is in America (I think). Another minor US/UK difference is that <shift 2> is double quotes in England, not @. In England, € is definitely <alt-gr 4>. I guess keyboard designers couldn't use <alt-gr e> because it was already in use. On English keyboards, <alt-gr> + a, e, i, o and u give á, é, í, ó and ú respectively. The other letter keys have no <alt-gr> assignments at all, although obviously I can edit the keyboard layout to change that.

I never understood why a certain computer company saw fit to squeeze three extra keys onto an already crowded keyboard. The left and right <windows> keys are functionally identical anyway, and the <menu> key is functionally identical to a right mouse click. In fact, if you have a working mouse, you'll never use <windows> or <menu> anyway. Okay, I accept that that particular OS needed TWO (not three) extra keys so that people without a mouse could still use it, but there were already three unused keys on the keyboard. Unused in Windows anyway. The keys <Prt Sc>, <Scroll Lock> and <Pause> may have been needed for DOS, but have no use at all in Windows. (Okay, so <Prt Sc> is used for "screen capture to clipboard" but who needs a button for that?). They could have just used, for example, <Scroll Lock> for <windows> and <Pause> for <menu>, without then having to scrunch up the <alt> and <alt-gr> keys and shrink the space bar. Maybe they just wanted to make more money by persuading everyone they had to buy a new keyboard; maybe they wanted to spread their logo around a bit further, who knows? But it was an extremely silly idea from the end users' point of view.

As another aside (and a possibly useful tip), I once had a keyboard with black keys, on which the letters were printed in white. Being a touch-typist, I painted all the key legends out with black paint, leaving only legendless keys. It wasn't the greatest of security devices, but no-one else in my household would even dream of using my computer thus configured. Passwords? They wouldn't know where to start! (Of course, they could have just unplugged the keyboard and plugged in a different one, but it definitely stopped the casual curious).

Jill

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marco Cimarosti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 5:44 PM
> To: 'Arcane Jill'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: [OT] Keyboards (was: American English translation of
> characte r names)
>
>
> Arcane Jill wrote:
> > Yeah, everything's shifted around, I know. But I think we
> > have one extra key, all told, to make room for the GBP
> > currency symbol (£).
>
> Isn't shat <shift + 3> on the UK keyboard? That's where it is
> in Italy.
>
> All non-US keyboard have an extra key on the right hand of
> the left shift
> key; what that key is used for, depends on locale.
>
> > They didn't add an extra key for the Euro though. We access that as
> <alt-gr + 4>.
>
> What OS is it? Most european keyboard I have seen have euro
> on <AltGr + E>.
>
> > Guess my <left-shift> is smaller than yours.
>
> Americans' <left-shift> is bigger than anybody else's. :-)
>
> _ Marco
>