A visual comparison of different national layouts on a computer keyboard (2019)

Some very lengthy pages on the subject of keyboards, no mention of ISO/IEC 9995-1 anywhere, nor any mention of "104-key", "105-key", "109-key" et al. in favour of some very confusing and idiosyncratic "ANSI", "ANSISO", "ISANSI" nomenclature instead, which the site proceeds to explain is confusing, wrong, and a popular (at least in the United States, the site says) misconception.

If it is confusing and wrong, it's a bad idea to base all of the other explanations on that terminology, because it just reinforces something that should not be reinforced. Yes, "109-key" can be off by as much as 20 keys; but it avoids implying the whole "ISO versus ANSI" nonsense, and making up things like "ISANSI" from whole cloth; and at least does imply that the important difference from "104-key" is 5 extra physical keys in various places.

I loathe the cost-cutting keyboard manufacturers have turned to over the recent years.

I cannot get a good danish keyboard anymore without the ÆØÅ keys having the Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish/Suomi keys printed on them as well, often in different colors.

My decade+ old "Logitech Illuminated" keyboard has been the best keyboard I've ever had but recently it's been acting up for me. It occasionally adds diacritics to random letters. Tried cleaning it with no luck. It was a danish-only version, laptop-like flat keys but with more "travel-distance" so it feels like the best of both worlds. Also had a nice flat palm-rest.

Unfortunately I can't get this keyboard or find something that has a similar form factor anymore anywhere - and if I can find some version of it, it has the the terrible multi-country-cost-cutting-keys on it. I suppose that if I find a replacement keyboard that I can move the old keys over to the new one (if they are even the same after all these years)

> Some standard for storing or otherwise representing the keyboard layout in hardware would be nice.

The keyboards by Sun Microsystems did do that, and their USB versions used the standard.

Keyboards like these are the worst kind of tech debt: they're literally a pain. Layouts like QWERTY, AZERTY, and so on reproduce the same layouts from nineteenth-century mechanical typewriters, which were designed to be inefficient, to avoid key jam. This explains why the most frequent letters of European languages, like E for English, require moving your left hand. Anyone designing a keyboard layout today would place the E on the home row of the right hand. The staggered-row design, too—where the Q row is shifted to the left of the A row, is also inherited from the typewriter days. This causes the left hand to crank back to the left unnaturally. When you add in the faraway placements of common keys, like Control, Backspace, or Delete, you have a recipe for repetitive stress injuries.

There are simple solutions to these problems. You can use a better keyboard layout, like Colemak or Dvorak, with your existing keyboard. The letters won't match the ones printed on the keys but if you touch-type it doesn't matter. If that bothers you, you can swap out your key caps, or use stickers. You can also just buy a well-designed keyboard. I use an Atreus keyboard, from Keyboardio, which fixes all of these problems, but there are lots of great keyboards which are commercially available, like the Planck or the ErgoDox, which help to fix the stagger problem.