Yup, you're not alone there.

+ another one.
Though to be fair I'm used to both now.

Mark

I'm used to the British layout. You know the defined standard BS 4822. As I live and work in Britain.

Edited for accuracy.

I use AZERTY coz i need that many more letters...

It's bloody confusing! I now reguarly use three layouts, and can just about adjust now. I do much prefer the iPhone two-step approach to accentation, though, which (iThink) more closely maps the chinese approach to character input with symbol-modification steps. Using an iPhone in AZERTY is bizarre, though, but otherwise it loses French auto-complete in QWERTY (which I guess makes sense). It's a simple switch, and one I reguarly make mid-input.

you can't expect people to remember how to type éàèçùäâïîëê or even ñ

The quote above the 2 is very much an IBM thing. DEC, Commodore, Apple and most other manufacturers always used it as shift + apostrophe, which makes a lot more sense and is easier for touch typists.

You should try the German layout. The "programming" brackets (square and braces) don't have their own keys, heck they aren't even marked on the keyboard! I had to search the internet and experiment to find them (right alt + 5 & 6 for square brackets and right alt + 8 & 9 for braces.

The "IBM" standard for German keyboards is right alt + 8 & 9 for square brackets and right alt + 7 & 0 for braces.

Oddly, you would think that the software receiving input from the keyboard would be more sensible. To get the ñ you would think it would be sensible to hit the OPTION (or ALT) key and press the ~ and then the letter you want it coupled with. But no - it has to be some obscure key press that is so obscure you need to do a Google to find out.

I know, but rather than having a seperate key for each of them you have a set of modifier keys which you press either before or after the letter to which the accent is to be applied. On the british Mac keyboards these are found under Alt+e, Alt+u, Alt+i (maybe - can't think right now) prior to inputting an accented character. On the iPhone you hold a character's key down to be presented with the various modified versions, and you select from there.

Maybe not, but it is not too bad.

The ones I use most are

Option + e that give you the accent that you get over the e as in café

Option + u as you might expect gives you the umlaut as in über

Option + c gives your the ç character

Option + i gives you the circumflex that goes over i like this î perhaps because this is used in Italian.

Others may be logical too, but I don't use these characters regularly so I can't say for sure.

Option + ` gives you accute accents, I believe. On windows though you have to know Unicode codes, or enter via point+click (Or at least they were the only ways I knew - maybe Vista onwards has improved this or I was unaware of better solutions using british keyboards)

Ah! I have just found ñ

It was Option + n who would have guessed?

Addition to my previous post, like Forquare1 said, the ' and " on the same key is the traditional UK layout.

Paulzolo, you are quoting a Windows XP layout for the UK, not the traditional QWERTY layout. With the change and the popularity or the IBM PC and MS-DOS, the IBM/Microsoft has become the de facto standard.

Keyboards with the UK layout pretty much died out, once the IBM PC became "the" PC. Apple is about the only company left using a UK layout and not an IBM/Microsoft UK layout.

Was just about to post that, it's not that obscure really.