You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be.
Perhaps I can explain.
↫ Marcin Wichary
It seems pretty obvious to me that’s what it was for, but I guess many normal, regular people have never seen anything but one particular keyboard configuration (ANSI for Americans, ISO for some Europeans, etc.) keyboards. Perhaps they don’t realise that not only are there ANSI keyboards with other layouts, but also entirely different keyboard configurations (mainly ISO and JIS).
Interestingly, my home country of The Netherlands uses a US English layout on an ANSI configuration, but of course, it’s the US International variant, either with deadkeys or using AltGr for the various accented/special characters we use. In my current country of residence, Sweden, they use this utterly wild and incomprehensible ISO layout where Shift unlocks characters on the bottom of keys, while AltGr unlocks characters at the top, the exact opposite of literally every other keyboard I’ve ever used (US Int’l, classic Dutch (no longer used), German, French, etc.). It’s utterly bizarre, but entirely normal to my Swedish wife.
We cannot use each other’s keyboards.
I never understood why, in this day and age, keyboards cannot be identified and indicate their layout to the operating system.
It seems it’d be trivial to implement, especially with USB.
Look in the kernel sources, at USB quirks. Cheap manufacturers reusing usbids for different devices, serial numbers reported as all zeros. It’s a bloody mess.
It wouldn’t work: keyboards are too cheap for manufacturers to care about correctly filling in a byte.
The keyboard controller does not know and care about what’s printed on the actual keys, it only cares about key codes.
Trying to embed such a keyboard layout id would presumably create more problems that is would fix. (You now need to customize the embedded controller on the assembly line. Which kind of memory chip/technology will you use? Battery powered can fail and will be a problem for waste management. Flash storage will be too expensive. And whatever you choose, you’re increasing the failure rate of the one device you don’t want to fail.)
Also, the lack of such an id is a non-issue for most users and OSes. Off the shelf computers come preconfigured for the local keyboard layout. OSes will ask you for your language (or detect it using IP-based geolocation), and suggest a default keyboard layout based on this.
Not sure why Apple chose to implement such a feature in MacOS. I guess many laptop Mac users did not want to purchase an expensive Apple keyboard, they would rather use some old PC keyboard, and Apple thought this as a clever way to support this? Also, when an user calls support because his keyboard doesn’t work, being told to just plug any keyboard instead will be better received than “please purchase a new 230€ keyboard and check whether it fixes your issue.”
The only reason not to do it would be cost. It would be extremely easy to add a small external ROM chip with an ID in it, But I agree that it’s a non-issue.
Also, I use a keyboard with a printed non-US layout, but I use it as a US keyboard. It would be very annoying if that weren’t possible.
I don’t know if I’m missing what you mean but I’ve grown up with Swedish keyboards and I don’t recognize shift unlocking characters on the bottom of keys. I walked around the office and couldn’t see a keyboard like that and googled images of US keyboards and it seemed to look very similiar. If there are symbols at the bottom (usually bottom right) then you unlock those with AltGr.
I second this, shift gives me the capital letters on my Swedish keyboard. Perhaps you think about the plethora of characters we have on the number row Thom?
I’d like to know as well. The Norwegian keyboard uses the same layout as the Swedish keyboard, except that we have Ø and Æ where you have Ö and Ä. I haven’t ever seen shift used for characters at the bottom. Thom, could you share an image? Quite a few of us are curious now.
Yeah, he’s probably reporting on his experience with some weird cheepo keyboard his wife is using, and made up some wild generalization of his own specific case.
The “alternative” keyboard market is overwhelmed with poorly designed keycaps, with totally fucked up symbols placement.
This has about a success rate of 10% on my Macs, even when I use Apple UK keyboards. Mostly the dialogue box returns a “no can recognise keyboard” message and asks me to pick between US/ISO/something else.