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(Ted Harding) wrote:
For what it's worth: I have a friend who is assertively proud of his Apple (with some justification ... ). When I was looking at it the other day I indeed wondered where the "#" was on the keyboard, and asked.
He eventually found out how to do it -- after an extensive tour of the internals!
That, for me as a programmer, was the biggest gripe about the Apple keyboard (notwithstanding the swapped " and @ keys) - getting a # was some some insane apple-shift-4 combination. If you spend a lot of time coding (and commenting) languages like Python or Perl, then this is a /real/ usability hassle.
In my experience of over 20 years using computers, I have always associated shift-2 with " and the key near return/enter as possessing the @ character. Even my trusty old 1977/78 Commodore PETs (well, CBM actually for the UK market) have the " character in the same position as the 2 would be on a "normal" UK keyboard. I did a fair amount of teaching over in the US, and I ended up taking my own keyboard with me as I would constantly end up typing stuff like 'food = @pasta@;' when using local machines. I feel that the original poster was right: Apple have more-or-less taken a default US keyboard and stuck a £ and Euro sign on it and called it "UK".
I too eventually subverted the Mac keyboard with the "hack" internationalisation file so I can use a regular keyboard with it - along with a sensible #, and " as shift-2 :-). Moving constantly from Mac to Linux (on conventional PC hardware) is just too much aggro otherwise.
Simon
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