This may seem a bit a tangential topic. It's not directly related to actual code, but is important for our line of work nevertheless.

Over the years, I've switched keyboards a few times. All of them had slightly different key layouts. And I'm not talking about the language/locale layout, but the physical layout! Why not the locale layout? Well, quite frankly, that's easy to change via software. I personally have a German keyboard but have it set to the UK layout. Why? It's quite hard to find different layouts in the shops where I live. Even ordering is not always easy in the shops. So that leaves me with Internet shops. But I prefer to "test" my keyboards before buying.

The most notable changes are:

Mangled "Home Key Block"

I've seen this first on a Logitech keyboard, but it may have originated elsewhere.

Shape of the "Enter" key

I've seen three different cases so far:

• Two lines high, wider at the top
• Two lines high, wider at the bottom
• One line high

Shape of the Backspace button

I've seen two types so far:

• One "character" wide
• Two "characters" wide

OS Keys

For Macs, you have the Option and Command buttons, for Windows you have the Windows and Context Menu buttons. Cherry even produced a Linux keyboard once (unfortunately I cannot find many details except news results). I assume a dedicated Linux keyboard would sport a Compose key and had the SysRq always labelled as well (note that some standard layouts do this already).

Obviously...

.. all these differences entail that some keys have to be moved around the board a lot. Which means, if you are used to one and have to work on another one, you happen to hit the wrong keys quite often. As it happens, this is much more annoying for programmers as it is for people who write texts. Mainly because the keys which are moved around are special character keys, often used in programming.

Often these hardware layouts depend also indirectly on where you buy the keyboards. Honestly, I haven't seen a keyboard with a one-line "Enter" key in Germany, nor Luxembourg. I may just have missed it but that's how it looks to me at least.

A survey

I've seen some attempts at surveys in the style "which keyboard is best for programming". But they all - in my opinion - are not using comparable sets. So I was wondering if it was possible to concoct a survey taking the above criteria into account. But ignoring key dimensions that one would be a bit overkill I guess ;)

From what I can see there are the following types of physical layout:

1. Backspace: 2-characters wide
   Enter: 2-Lines, wider top
2. Backspace: 2-characters wide
   Enter: 1-Line
3. Backspace: 1-character wide
   Enter: 2-Lines, wider bottom

Then there are the other possible permutations (home-key block, os-keys), which in total makes for quite a large list of categories.

Now, I wonder... Would anyone be interested in such a survey? I personally would. Because I am looking for the perfect fit for me. If yes, then I could really use the help of anyone here to propose some models to include in the survey. Once I have some models for each category (I'd say at least 3 per category) I could go ahead and write up a survey, put it on-line and let the it collect data for a while.

What do you think?