Main articles: Typewriter and Sholes and Glidden typewriter Keys are arranged on diagonal columns to give space for the levers.

Most typewriters use a QWERTZ keyboard with Polish letters (with diacritical marks) accessed directly (officially approved as "Typist's keyboard", Polish: klawiatura maszynistki, Polish Standard PN-87), which is mainly ignored in Poland as impractical (custom-made keyboards, e.g., those in the public sector as well as some Apple computers, present an exception to this paradigm); the "Polish programmer's" ( Polish: polski programisty) layout has become the de facto standard, used on virtually all computers sold on the Polish market. There are four Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in versions of Microsoft Windows until Vista came out: This article or section may need to be cleaned up or summarized because it has been split from/to List of QWERTY keyboard language variants.Further information: British and American keyboards United Kingdom and Ireland (except Mac) keyboard layout United Kingdom Keyboard layout for Linux In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left. [3] :12–20 In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows: [3] :24–25 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -

Finally , instead of being the normal output of their keys, are produced by shifting the same keys. diaeresis or umlaut (e.g. ä, ë, ö, etc.) is generated by a dead key combination AltGr+ 2, then the letter. Thus AltGr+ 2 a produces ä. There is also an alternative keyboard layout called Norwegian with Sámi, which allows for easier input of the characters required to write various Sámi languages. All the Sámi characters are accessed through the AltGr key.

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One popular but possibly apocryphal [2] :162 explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. [5] Differences from modern layout Substituting characters Christopher Latham Sholes's 1878 QWERTY keyboard layout The central characteristics of the Swedish keyboard are the three additional letters Å/å, Ä/ä, and Ö/ö. The same visual layout is also in use in Finland and Estonia, as the letters Ä/ä and Ö/ö are shared with the Swedish language, and even Å/å is needed by Swedish-speaking Finns. However, the Finnish multilingual keyboard adds new letters and punctuation to the functional layout.