Very true, and this will likely not change. Even users of "ergonomic" layouts want to keep this ergonomy for their letters (an letter pairs). All that can be made reasonable is to extend existing layouts with minimal changes: basic letters, decimal digits, and basic punctuation must remain at the same place (and there's also some resistance for the most common few additional letters used in each language that are typically placed on the 1st row, or near the Enter key). What is likely to change is the placement of combinations using AltGr on the first row (but on non-US keyboards, these also include some ASCII characters considered essential on a computer like the backslash, hash sign, tilde, arrobace, or underscore)
This leaves little freedom for changes except for keys currently assigned to less essential characters such as the degree sign, the micro sign, the pound sign (in countries not usingf this symbol daily), the "universal" currency sign, the paragraph mark... Those can be used to fit better candidates for extensions. But without an extension of keyboard rows, it will be difficult to have a wide adoption on physical keyboards. Function keys F1..F12 may be easily reduced to fit additional keys for letters and diacritics. Keyboards have instead been extended for many things that most people in fact almost never use or don't need there such as multimedia keys, shortcuts to launch the browser or calculator app. or the contextual menu/options key (added by Windows), or TWO (sic!) keys for the Windows key (Keep only one and map the few additional keys found on Japanese keyboards). But it is challenging to have decent sizes for keys on notebooks keyboards which are already extremely packed (F1..F12 are already reduced vertically). They invented another way: using a new "Fn" mode key for additional multimedia keys (or keys for switching the Wifi, Bluetooth or display adapters, or control the display lightness or sound volume/mute, or to eliminate the PrintScreen function, or the ScrollLock or NumLock mode switch keys). A few of them added a couple of character keys for currency units ($ and €) instead of the Japanese mode keys. In fact every brand has done what it wanted to extend the keyboards... except for extending really the usable alphabets. For virtual on-screen layouts, there's much more freedom as the display panel is adaptative and allows more innovative input methods, of things never dound on physical keyboards such as entering emojis. 2016-05-10 16:55 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Otto Stolz wrote: > > > Yes, there is somebody going there. E. g., the German standard > > DIN 2137:2012-06 defines a “T2” layout which is meant > > for all official, Latin-based orthographies worldwide, and > > additionally for the Latin-based minority languages of Germany > > and Austria. The layout is based on the traditional QWERTZU layout > > for German and Austrian keyboards (which is now dubbed “T1”). > > Cf. <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_(Tastaturbelegung)>. > > Yes, but there's the rub. QWERTY users are about as willing to switch to > QWERTZ in the name of global standardization as Germans would be to > switch to QWERTY. > > -- > Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸 > > >
