I think everybody who had to program using a standard German (or any other international) keyboard layout on Windows (or Mac) will complain about the conundrum of either having all special characters ( [ ] | { } / etc. ) needed for most programming languages "at the fingertip" and "losing" the language specific characters (umlauts ä ö ü etc.) on the keyboard or viceversa: having simple access to umlauts, but not to brackets etc.

If you are programming in C / C++ / C# / Java / Javascript for example, it is very exhausting if you have to press Alt-Gr + 7 for every opening curly bracket. It is an ergonomic nightmare and reduces your typing efficiency.

What is the best way to cope with this problem? Is there a satisfying solution? Maybe there are special layouts or keyboards which address this issue?