The Netherlands is one of the few countries in Europe that uses the US-QWERTY keyboard layout for computers. Before there were personal computers, we had typewriters and nearly all typewriters sold in The Netherlands had two dead keys: one dead key contained the acute and grave accents and the other contained the diaeresis and circumflex accents. When you press a dead key on a typewriter, the accent is printed, but the carriage does not advance. The next letter you type gets printed under the accent you just typed. The positions of many symbols on the keyboard were not standardised: different brands of typewriters could have the question mark in a different location. The letters always followed the QWERTY layout. Some did have a special key for the letter ij, on others you had to type the letters I and J separately.
Typewriters in the UK and the USA typically didn’t have dead keys. If you really, really want to type an accented letter, you could type the apostrophe, then backspace and then the letter. The same could we done with the double quote to get something that resembled a letter with an umlaut or diaeresis. In The Netherlands we used to type a comma, then backspace and then the letter C to get a C-cedilla (ç). Typewriters in Germany had dedicated keys for Ä, Ö, Ü and ß. Typewriters in Sweden had Ä, Ö and Å, in Norway and Denmark they had Æ, Ø and Å. Most of them had dead keys for accented letter too.
France and Belgium had the weird AZERTY layout. French typewriters typically had a single dead key for circumflex and diaeresis, the few letters with acute and grave had their own keys, as did c-cedilla, but all only in lowercase.
When personal computers were introduced, nearly all European countries standardised on a keyboard layout that was similar to the layout of the local typewriters, except for The Netherlands, that used the US layout, without any support for accented letters. In Dutch, accented letters are infrequent, but they are still important. The IBM-PC allowed you to type arbitrary symbols by holding down the Alt-key and then typing the numeric code of the character on the numeric keypad. For example the letter ë could be had by typing Alt-1-3-7. Oddly enough, this still works in modern Windows, even though it no longer uses that character encoding at all. Yes, the old CP-437 codes are translated to whatever Unicode character is applicable.
National keyboard layouts other than US-QWERTY, all have one additional key left of the leftmost letter on the lower row. On QWERTY, this means left of the Z key, but on QWERTZ, it’s left of the Y and on AZERTY, it’s left of the W. In most national layouts, this key has the less-than and greater-than symbols..As there is an extra key in that position, the left shift key is much smaller than on the US keyboard. Some US keyboards (ISO layout) have this additional key too, while it is redundant for US-QWERTY. Many typists prefer the true ANSI layout with the wider shift key and the horizontal Enter key, over the ISO layout with the narrow shift key and the vertical Enter key.
National keyboard layouts other then US-QWERTY, also use the right Alt key (marked as Alt-Gr) to access additional symbols. The ASCII characters @, [, ], { and } often require the Alt-Gr key. Most national keyboard layouts use the keys right of the letters for national letters (like Ä, Æ or Ñ) and/or dead keys, making fewer keys available for symbols. Only the UK keyboard layout does not have national letters or dead keys and is very similar to US-QWERTY. It swaps the @ and double-quote, it puts the £ instead of the # above the 3 and it puts the # on the key normally used by the \ symbol, which moves to the additional key left of the Z.
Programmers prefer the straight US-QWERTY layout over any national keyboard layout, because of the easy access to square brackets and curly braces, which are used frequently in C and similar programming languages.
Interestingly enough, the Netherlands does have a national keyboard layout. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_QWERTY_keyboard_language_variants under Dutch. This keyboard has dead keys, like the old typewriters and shuffles the symbols around quite a bit. the square brackets end up on the key left of the Z. These proper Dutch keyboards are very rare. They may have been used by government institutions and Dutch publishers, but as 99% of the users has US-QWERTY at home, they are used to it and want to use it for work too.
The reason why the Dutch layout never caught on may be a combination of programmer preference and cost awareness. US keyboards are made in larger series, therefore they tend to be somewhat cheaper. Schools may have selected US-QWERTY because it is more practical for programming.
In Belgium, even in the Dutch speaking part, AZERTY is still the norm. Some programmers do use QWERTY keyboards, but that’s always a special order.
At least since the 1990s, Windows lets you configure the US-QWERTY keyboard as US International with dead keys. This changes the following:
- the apostrophe and double quote key becomes a dead key for acute accent and diaeresis. The same goes for the Caret (circumflex on shift 6) and the grave and tilde key.
- The right Alt key gives access to many additional symbols and accented letters. Unfortunately for Dutch users, the letters ë and ï are not accessible this way, they require the dead double quote key instead.
The US International layout with dead keys, is considered the Dutch keyboard layout, but this is not the same as the real Dutch keyboard layout. The big disadvantage is that you need to type an additional space whenever you type an apostrophe or double quote (or caret, left quote or tilde). This is super annoying for programmers, but it can also get in your way when typing just text..
Linux distributions come with another option: US International with AltGr dead keys. It differs from US international with dead keys in the following way:
- The dead keys only become dead when you type them with AltGr (the right Alt key). When you type the apostrophe key normally, you just get the apostrophe. It only becomes the dead acute accent key when typed with AltGr.
- The set of symbols accessible with AltGr (without dead keys) is changed somewhat. the imported Dutch accented letters ë and ï are now in.
But there are other layouts based on US-QWERTY as well, see for example: https://altgr-weur.eu/
In Linux you can also configure a Compose key. You can use the right Control key, the right “Windows” key or the Menu key for that purpose. The disadvantage is that it requires three keystrokes to get a composed character. For example you type Compose, followed by /, followed by o to get ø. The advantage is you get access to many more symbols than with just dead keys or Alt-Gr combinations and that these symbols are mostly logical and easy to remember combinations of ASCII characters.
Finally, Linux allows you to type any arbitrary Unicode character by typing first Ctrl-Shift-u, then the hex code of the desired character and finally Enter. For example Ctrl-shift-u, then the letter e b, then Enter gives you ë.
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