A German software developer should think about using a US keyboard because:
- IDE shortcuts are based on a US keyboard layout, so that some shortcuts can’t be used. E.g. Ctrl-Shift-/ won’t work because / is Shift-7 on are German keyboard
- Important characters like {,},[,],@,=,? are easily reachable
- Only the alphabet letters z and y are switched
- There are ways to type German umlaute more easily than on a German keyboard (cont. reading!).
Mac
Developer who can call a Mac their own should use the modified US keyboard from Jan Borchers. It allows you to press option-a instead of option-u-a for the letter รค. I think this is even better then the layout on a German keyboard. The installation is done quickly:
- download
- unzip
move Roman.bundle to /Library/Keyboard Layouts- move USGerman.icns and USGerman.keylayout from within Roman.bundle to /Library/Keyboard Layouts
- restart your mac
- add and select keyboard “U.S. With Umlauts via Option Key”
For a detailed instruction visit the above link.
Linux and Windows
Bernd Schoeller has created similar layouts for Linux and Windows
Update
If you are using CoRD to connect to windows machines you have the problem that the keyboard layout is automatically mapped to romanian. To fix this you need to open
/Applications/CoRD.app/Contents/Resources/windows_keymap_table.txt
and change the key Romanian to – in my case english: Romanian=0×409
Update
When you move the Roman.bundle to /Library/Keyboard Layout it could happen that suddenly the layout stop working. This might effect some accounts only. To prevent you from that you need to copy the *.icns and *.keyboard file into /Library/Keyboard Layout and restart your mac.
