German keyboard layout and programming
I’m more and more getting used to a German keyboard layout again. But muscle memory really takes a while to re-adjust after around eight years on an English layout. And I remain sceptical I can ever be as efficient on a German layout when programming. There are just too many common characters “hidden” behind a “shift”-, “option”- or even “shift-option”-shortcut. Symbols like semicolon, brackets, curly braces or backticks are all more cumbersome to type on a German keyboard. And on the Mac terminal I no longer like to set the “Use Option as Meta key”-option – like I used to, to get word-deletion and -skipping – because the pipe (”|”) character is “option-7″ and a backslash is fuckin’ “shift-option-7″. And neither works when that option takes over “option”.
The upside is, I can type German umlauts again easily. Hüürääy!