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Let's steal a paragraph from wikipedia:
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
Keyboards are really cool! There are computer ones, software ones, and music ones. But I'll be writing about computer ones, and a bit of software too.
(this is a very high-level idea of how they work)
When a key is pressed or actuated, it sends a scancode to your operating system. This details the key's row and column, not the character. The OS will convert this scancode into a binary character, using a conversion table (aka keyboard mapping). This allows you to totally change what is typed on a page, without physically changing the keyboard keys.
(care is taken to include major OS specific keys)
Made when typewriters were made, designed to be slow to prevent the keys jamming, all the common keys are as far away from each other as possible. Though that won't stop me type at ~112 wpm
This is the most common layout, the most common variant being the ISO (UK) as apposed to ANSI (US)
French/Belgian layout
Central European "kezboard" layout, this exists because of two very important reasons:
Then there are umlauted characters
no image reference availabe
Italian layout for typewriters, although computer keyboards mostly use QWERTY:
examples of 100,80 and 60% keyboard layouts
named after it's author, August Dvorak. the most common keys are found in the home row
basically Dvorak and QWERTY's love child, makes it easier to learn for the uninitiated without sacrificing efficiency
The positions of the letters are not only optimised for German letter frequency, but also for typical groups of two or three letters. English is considered a major target as well.
the layers appear to allow many different character sets, although I haven't a clue
The honeycomb layout has hexagon keys and was invented by Typewise in cooperation with the ETH Zurich
this article was written on my phone, expect spelling mistakes. I turned off autocorrect in Florisboard (which is an amazing keyboard btw. qwerty ofc)