Keyboard layout

The Break key can be used by software in several different ways, such as to switch between multiple login sessions, to terminate a program, or to interrupt a modem connection.

In countries using the Latin script, the center, alphanumeric portion of the modern keyboard is most often based on the QWERTY design by Christopher Sholes.

In 2012, an argument was advanced by two Japanese historians of technology showing that the key order on the earliest Sholes prototypes in fact followed the left-right and right-left arrangement of the contemporary Hughes-Phelps printing telegraph, described above.

[18] Later iterations diverged progressively for various technical reasons, and strong vestiges of the left-right A-N, right-left O-Z arrangement can still be seen in the modern QWERTY layout.

[22] Based on this work, a well-known ergonomic expert wrote a report[23] which was adopted at the ISO Berlin meeting in 1985 and became the reference for keyboard layouts.

This can be, e.g., for masking foreign layouts, adding additional information such as shortcuts, learning aids, gaming controls, or solely for decorational purposes.

For example, a user with a Swedish keyboard who wishes to type more easily in German may switch to a functional layout intended for German—without regard to key markings.

On Macintosh computers these keys are usually just represented by symbols without the word "Enter", "Shift", "Command", "Option/Alt" or "Control", with the exception of keyboards distributed in the US and East Asia.

In Czechia and Slovakia diacritical characters like Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý, Á, Í also replace numbers.

In recent years, however, a modified QWERTY layout with stressed keys such as à, è, ò, has gained widespread usage throughout Italy.

The layout came before computers came to be, so it challenges programmers and power users because keyboard shortcuts, like copy-paste are in totally different locations, punctuation symbols are significantly affected, while common commands like ls -ls result in strenuous use of the pinky finger.

[49] These intend to offer much of the reduced finger movement of Dvorak without the steep learning curve and with an increased ability to remain proficient with a QWERTY keyboard.

Unlike AZERTY, the characters needed for good French typography are easily accessible: for example, the quotation marks (« ») and the curved apostrophe are available directly.

A detailed table published in the December 1956 issue of Sekreter Daktilograf magazine provided insights into letter frequencies in Turkish, which were then used to guide the ergonomic layout of the F-keyboard.

To accommodate the influx of PCs, authorities eventually interpreted the existing F-keyboard regulation as applying only to typewriters, thus exempting computers from the mandate.

To fit on a Sholes-patterned (typewriter or computer) keyboard, the Blickensderfer layout was modified by Nick Matavka in 2012, and released for both Mac OS X and Windows.

The FITALY layout is optimized for use with a stylus, places the most commonly used letters closest to the centre and thus minimizing the distance travelled when entering words.

A similar concept was followed to research and develop the MessagEase keyboard layout for fast text entry with stylus or finger.

The ATOMIK layout, designed for stylus use, was developed by IBM using the Metropolis Algorithm to mathematically minimize the movement necessary to spell words in English.

All non-Latin computer keyboard layouts can also support input of Latin letters as well as the script of the language, which is useful for tasks such as typing URLs or names.

[29] InScript is the standard keyboard for 12 Indian scripts including Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu, etc.

The Royal institute of the Amazigh culture (IRCAM) developed a national standard Tifinagh keyboard layout for Tamazight people in Morocco.

More commonly, however, the phonetic keyboard is used on smartphones and desktops, aligning the Urdu letters with their Latin counterparts (for example, pressing Q types ق).

[109] Like the Dvorak layout, it has been designed to optimize typing speed and efficiency, placing the most common letters in the Bulgarian language—О, Н, Т, and А—under the strongest fingers.

This layout is available as an alternative to the BDS one in some operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux.

In 2006, Prof. Dimiter Skordev from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University and Dimitar Dobrev from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences proposed a new standard, prBDS 5237:2006, including a revised version of the BDS layout, which includes the letter Ѝ and the capital Ы and replaces the letters I and V with the currency symbols of $ and € respectively, and a standardization of the informal "phonetic" layout.

The earliest known implementation of the Cyrillic-to-QWERTY homophonic keyboard was by former AATSEEL officer Constance Curtin between 1972 and 1976, for the PLATO education system's Russian Language curriculum developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Instead, it uses combinations like sh, sc, ch, ya (ja), yu (ju), ye (je) and yo (jo) to input ш, щ, ч, я, ю, э, and ё, respectively.

Due to the bialphabetic nature of the language, actual physical keyboards with the Serbian Cyrillic layout printed on the keys are uncommon today.

The shifted values of many keys (digits, together with :* ; + - =) are a legacy of bit-paired keyboards, dating back to ASCII telex machines and terminals of the 1960s and 1970s.