Slightly off-topic but it seems to me that most keyboard layouts but the US seem to be completely retarded—almost bordering a conspiracy—with regard to usability when coding, using emacs and using the unix shell.

When I see someone coding with a non-us layout I smell the humble inexperience and nod with compassion. The difference between layouts can be astonishing if you only bang a lots of []{}|/\?-=+_-*()@#$'s. For some reason, computer languages are full of those.

I use the us layout all the time except when I have to write something in my native language and need the umlauts more easily. I remember the killing pain of trying to write code in it until I realized I can just turn on the US keyboard. Luckily, that was before my career...

Actually QWERTY was created to slow typists down. Back in ye olde days, when typewriters were still around, there was the problem where people who typed to fast would jam the typewriters. Thus, QWERTY was invented to slow people down so the typewriters wouldn't jam. Then, when computers came along, everybody knew QWERTY, so they continued using it.

That's an apocryphal story, though. QWERTY was said to have been invented, actually, to make it easier for typewriter salesmen to type "TYPEWRITER", all from the top row.

Actually that's (and typing other frequent programming related stuff like the semicolon, or the brackets) one of the reasons I switched to us keyboard layout.