The Finnish keyboard layout is
literally painful with
programming,
unix shells, and probably many other
areas where
punctuation
characters are used
extensively:
- / and a few other punctuations are accessed with the
Shift key, as opposed to the unmodified access in the US, UK and
some other layouts.
-
{ [ ] } \ | are accessed with the AltGr key. It is much
worse than Shift because both the modifier and the keys are on the
right-hand side. It is generally much easier to press the modifier
with one hand and the key with the other. It's the reason for two
Shift keys, for example.
- < and > are on the same key, with one of them
unmodified and one via the Shift. It is a difficult situation whenever
these are used as
bracket-like delimiters, such as in HTML tags. Brackets like ( )
[ ] { } usually have the same modifier for both
members of the pair, and it also applies to the < > in
the US and UK keyboards.
The reasons for this layout are difficult for me to imagine. If you take a
US keyboard and append the å ä ö, you
need to relocate three of the punctuation keys. (AltGr is still
necessary because of the increased total number of symbols.) The Finnish layout has a lot
more changes than this, and most of these only seem to make typing
harder. I personally use the UK layout and switch to the Finnish one
only when I need to type long texts in Finnish. This is despite a long
exposure to Finnish keyboards.
Fortunately, some keyboard layouts have an umlaut character which
allows one to type letters like 'ä' and 'ö'1. The British keyboard driver
of XFree86/Xorg has this at AltGr+[.
-
'Å' is used in Swedish which is another official
language in Finland. There is a similar
modifier for these 'ringed' letters, the X layout has it at AltGr+Shift+[.