The Czech Keyboard is more badass than you may think

The Czech keyboard cannot into this:

@#$%^&{}[]\|<>`~

The | and \ (or maybe & and *) can be typed if you happen to posses a keyboard with an additional key next to the reduced left Shift, sometimes called Macro key.

But can into this:

Paragraph symbol: §

Dead keys for accents:

° åů

´ áíúéóýŕĺ

ˇ čďěľňřšťž

¨ äëïöüÿ

Underlined are not typeable using single key.

What Czechs don't usually know if they are not used to their keyboard enough, is that they don't have to switch to American keyboard to write apostrophe, to German to write umlauts, to Swedish to write å and to Slovak to write ŕ, ĺ and ľ, but need to switch keyboard (to American-International or Slovak) to write ô. The keyborads are sometimes incorrectly labeled, my had twice " and ;, even though one of them writes ° and '.

This means that Czechs don't need Swedish, German (ß - Alt+225 or "ss") and Slovak keyboard. There is still need for the American one to write the characters above if people's memory for remembering Alt-codes or AltGr-combinations is insufficient. Note that Alt-codes are mainly a DOS thing, which has remained in Windows because of muscle memory of some people like me. Linux users have to rely on AltGr.


EDIT: This post is the 1st to exceed 100 views. How did that happen? Anyway, I've extended it.

However if you somehow remember the AltGr combinations, which aren't usually written on keyboards except for @ and €, you can type:

~ˇ^˘°˛`˙´˝¨¸ \|€÷× đĐ[]łŁ$ߤ #&@{}<>*

For me the Shift+AltGr modifier doesn't give anything, which is sad because there are so many unused combinations among 192 (196 with Macro key, 188 without the numpad /*-+ keys) possible characters. That means only the $ character from American keyboard can't be typed on the Czech keyboard. The Alt code is 36 for those cases. But there was no such thing as AltGr on typewriters. The layout may differ from system to system, for example in Windows XP 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM) it's totally different. Some machines might not even have that key and Ctrl+Alt won't help you.

The Czech, Slovak and Polish keyboard is QWERTZ because of German occupation. To this day it gets annoying when I am instructed to press Y to confirm something and it turns out I pressed Z so I have to press the other key. Each program can handle the input differently. For example Doom captured the keys directly and had them mapped to American keyboard, meaning on French one you would walk with QSDZ instead of ASDW. This was to deal with residential keyboard drivers which could mix the keys up. One more annoying thing on the Czech one is that numbers write with Shift, which gets irritating when editing Excel sheets on notebooks without numpad or otherwise working with numbers. The Programmer's one has accented keys on AltGr, but Shift+AltGr don't produce the capital ones, neither does Capslock on.


EDIT 2: This got tremendously spammed, now reached nearly 3000 views. I don't think you're that interested in Czech keyboard layout.

One of the comfy sides is that you type parentheses using minimal movement of fingers, since both opening and closing one are on the same key. This is good for LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses) and anything similar, most notably nesting =IF()s in spreadsheets. Seriously who invented this was Satan, only Malbolge comes close. Just look at that Python, no missing ; hunting, no )))))))))))) (});});});});});}); in JavaScript) at function end and well-formatted or it doesn't work. Who needs Java anyway, it ain't got even unsigned things and pointers.


EDIT 3: 11111 views! Are you guys really that interested in Czech keyboard layout?