We usually have a narrow left-shift key (even on laptops sometimes), which makes room for the backslash key to the bottom-left of “A”.

For some reason though, most laptop manufacturers prefer to keep the wide left-shift of US layouts, even for a UK keyboard, and then just move the backslash/pipe key somewhere else.

I’m a developer in the UK and I can confirm that both my Dell laptop and desktop workstation have the
backslash bottom-left, next to the Z key. I’m not suggesting that this is a good thing or anything-
it’s just something that we’ve been forced to get used to in the UK :-s

The crazy thing for a developer is that Apple UK keyboards have the backslash above the right shift,
and they @ symbol is swapped with the ” key (compared to UK PC keyboards)… This is a pain for
developers switching between the two - don’t even ask about #.

Perhaps Claus was a little unnecessarily short with you.

– Scott

As you will notice the “Alt Gr” key is still on that keyboard, it just replaces the right ALT key on all non-US keyboards. So again I assert, why did they move the backslash key on the keyboard and change the international standard for the QWERTY keyboard layout. The issue here is that Z key is under the S and D instead of the standardized A and S keys, check out all the keyboard layouts for your self: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

And it is pretty offensive to me that you assume that I know nothing about the international keyboard layouts, it is very narrow minded of you and you should be ashamed of yourself. I have many friends through out Europe and we constantly talk about the different perceptions of Europe vs. the US. And your narrow minded rants seem to justify how Americans feel about Europeans. Congratulations on being a stereotype.

Personally I like the extra room on the bottom row and the bigger shift key, and the enter key on the US keyboards is very comfortable, even though it is smaller. Plus for touch typists it maps well to DVORAK.

Nothing wrong, your simply lack knowlegde about keyboards :p

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