Trying the US-Intl keyboard layout

So, yeah, trying to learn a new keyboard layout, apparently my (non-existent) hobbies aren’t boring enough yet.

I used a german keyboard layout for most of my life and while it works great for typing german text, it doesn’t fare so well when programming or trying to use a CLI. These tasks use a lot of special characters like /, which would be SHIFT+7 for german. This is mostly workable but can get annoying when using something like vim, or tools that have vim-like keybinds¹.

Another pain point is that I use a mac laptop at work and for some reason some special characters, like ( and [, are shifted from the “regular” layout windows/linux use.

So, I gave up and decided to give a US layout a choice. I decided to go with the US International layout as that still allows umlauts².

Biggest pain right now? Obviously the switched y and z³.

It does work better than I thought it would, maybe I will actually stick with it. Time will tell.