Metronome Shortcut in Ardour 6

[mhartzel (Mikael Hartzell)]

@speak

For the record I’m also Finnish and have been using the US layout for years now. When I need to type Finnish, I just switch layouts with shift+caps.

This is not how it should be, is it By the way is your keyboard physically Finnish of US ? It’s easy to change layouts but not so easy to remember where each character is when it’s not printed on the keyboard.

This conversation proves that the problem exists and there currently is no good solution to it. Maybe I should ask Linus to force kernel maintainers to write all code comments in Finnish, that’ll teach them

[speak]

It’s a physically Finnish keyboard, but I have been touch typing since a young age so that’s not really a problem. Switching to the US layout took a while to learn, but nothing like trying to switch to Dvorak or something.

And yes, it’s not an optimal situation, but for me having the switch on shift+caps poses no real problems, so I’m quite satisfied. The alternative would be for all of the programs I listed to start shipping custom keyboard shortcut maps for each layout out there, which just isn’t feasible.

[mhartzel (Mikael Hartzell)]

@speak

which just isn’t feasible

I get your point, but I don’t agree with the last sentence. Programs are translated to lots of languages and that is a much more difficult and time consuming task than say 30 - 40 keyboard shortcuts. The technology is there, it’s not a huge job but the will is not there.

[paul (Paul Davis)]

@mhartzel

It’s also kind of strange to serve users in just one country / language but not others. But that’s how it’s been for decades and with all kinds of software.

We support many countries with translations.

This isn’t really about language or countries. It’s about keyboard layout. Most non-native English programmers that I know prefer using a US layout keyboard because most of they do with a keyboard is not locale-sensitive. As Robin has noted, for those few instances where he needs an umlaut, he can get one. I’d go a step further, and say that as native English speaker, even the typical UK keyboard layout feels horrible to me as a programmer. So this is not really about countries and language, which I care about a great deal, but about keyboard layout preferences, which are in turn heavily influenced by your relationship with computers.

But as has already been said, we will be happy if someone was to step up to create and maintain shortcuts for other keyboard layouts. There’s no opposition to this idea, just nobody currently to do the required work.

[paul (Paul Davis)]

@mhartzel

I get your point, but I don’t agree with the last sentence. Programs are translated to lots of languages and that is a much more difficult and time consuming task than say 30 - 40 keyboard shortcuts. The technology is there, it’s not a huge job but the will is not there.

Actually, you’re wrong here. There is a rich infrastructure for dealing with translations. There is zero infrastructure for dealing with specific keyboard layouts and bindings/shortcuts (partly because there’s no universal mechanism of dealing with shortcuts, whereas strings (textual data) is just strings).

[mhartzel (Mikael Hartzell)]

I could maintain a Finnish keyboard shortcut preset for Ardour, but I guess it would take many people to do the job properly because I can not see one person buying all western physical keyboards to support all the shortcuts. I have a small open source project of my own that I maintain and I can see myself doing some work for Ardour that is within my capabilities.