The German keyboard layout is great. It has everything you need, including all of the umlauts, the ß and also the µ. For programming, however, the German keyboard layout is 💩: The normal braces are on 8 and 9 with shift state, just off by one from the English ones at 9 and 0, but the square and curly braces are available only on Alt-Gr combos left and right from that. Also the forward and backward slashes are Shift and Alt-Gr combos. You can imagine that this slows you down.
So, to be more efficient when writing code, I tried and trained myself to use an English keyboard layout. This is, what I learned. Continue reading "English keyboard layout hints for German developers"