British and American keyboards

Keyboard Layouts

There are two major English language computer keyboard layouts, the United States layout and the United Kingdom layout defined in BS 4822 (48 key version). Both are QWERTY layouts. Users in the United States do not frequently need to make use of the £ (pound) and € (euro) currency symbols, which are common needs in the United Kingdom and Ireland, although the $ (dollar sign) symbol is also provided as standard on UK and Irish keyboards. In other countries which predominantly use English as a common working language, such as Australia, Canada (in English speaking parts), and New Zealand, the US keyboard is commonly used.

Since the standard US keyboard layout in Microsoft Windows offers no way of inputting any sort of diacritic or accent, this makes it unsuitable for all but a handful of languages unless the US International layout is used. The US International layout changes the (grave), (tilde), (circumflex), (double quote, to make diaeresis), and (apostrophe, to make acute accent) keys into dead keys for producing accented characters: thus for example  (release)  will produce The US International layout also uses the right alt (AltGr) as a modifier to enter special characters. The equivalent mapping for UK/Irish keyboards is called the "UK Extended" layout which, if activated in settings, will allow the user to enter a wide variety of diacritics (such as grave accents) which are not accommodated by the standard UK/Irish layout. In particular, à,è,ì,ò,ù used in Scots Gaelic can be made (using , release and then the vowel), the ŵ and ŷ used in Welsh (using (^), release, then etc.). Likewise, the Spanish and Portuguese letters ñ and õ can be made (using (~), release, then etc.). For more specialized uses, there is a facility in Windows for users to create a customized layout that may match their needs more precisely.

Other operating systems can optionally re map the keyboard layout or have different modifier keys (for example the Amiga keyboard has "A" modifier keys and BBC Micro or Acorn keyboards often had a "Shift Lock" as well as a "Caps Lock"). Under Unix/Linux the "Windows" key is often called the "Super" key and can be re mapped by users for specific functionality but in most programs by default does nothing. Some older Unix/Linux software, such as Emacs, uses the left Alt key as a "Meta" key, which harks back to older MIT or LISP computers. ChromeOS uses the US and UK Windows layouts, except that the Caps Lock key is labelled with a "fisheye" (◉) and by default acts as an "everything" search key. (There is an option in Settings to revert it to convention). The function key row is also differently labelled. The UK extended layout for ChromeOS is provided by a Chrome add on, and provides ready access to a substantially greater (than Windows) repertoire of precomposed characters for western, central and eastern European (Latin alphabet) languages.

There are also Dvorak Layouts for each region.