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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

The bit about a gradual migration towards English-style quotes due to the gentle but inexorable pressure of keyboards and software lacking the proper native equivalent is interesting and a bit depressing. I wonder if over time there will be a drift away from diacritics and non-English characters (like ß) for the same reason.

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I actually have the opposite take. The use of "X" instead of «X» in Russia started with the typewriters, not the computers. Apple added the correct quotation marks in iOS 11, and you could see how people very quickly switched to using them on social media. The software helped people rediscover the correct symbols and drop the typewriter-era bad habits, all it took was a small software upgrade.

On iOS, " is automatically auto corrected to « for me.

Are people switching voluntarily or because it is the new default?

If you are using the Russian keyboard, it's the new default (since iOS 11). Before that, you had to long-press the " to get it (along with ˝, „ and all these other marks.

Interestingly, the computer keyboards are stuck with the old layouts. You can't buy a Russian keyboard with the right quotation marks. I am using a custom layout by Ilya Birman [1] that makes a nice remapping with «» available quickly.

[1] https://ilyabirman.ru/projects/typography-layout/

Irish lost the overdot diacritic in the move away from traditional Irish type around the 1940s, but it will never lose the acute accent (síne fada) because the meaning of a word is completely different if you drop it.

Eg:

Féar - grass. Fear - man. Cás - case. Cas - turn. Lóndubh - (nonsense) black lunch. Londubh - blackbird.

The keyboard part is always somewhat surprising to me. There are layouts, some designed for specific languages, others to cover as many languages as possible, that enable entering all of the diacritics and custom characters one might need. Now obviously those never managed to gather steam, but I have to wonder why. Do people just not feel strongly enough about it?

As someone else pointed out [0], and I concur with, macOS does a good job on this. You can type e.g. German umlauts (äöü) and eszett (ß) effortlessly (Option+u a/o/u, and Option+s respectively), or British Pounds (£, Option+#, where it would be on a UK keyboard), all on an ANSI layout. Maybe less so for «», which is Option+\ and Option+| (i.e. Option+Shift+\). Might've been nicer to put these on Option+[ and Option+].

Personally, I've always hated the ISO enter key and QWERTZ (although that's a bit of a tangent). I also think having a different keyboard for every European language is a losing strategy, especially when people might be required to type in two languages. If you know about it, for some languages the macOS approach works really well.

iOS is also passable; a long press brings up options (e.g. on s -> ß/ś/š). It's a bit more tedious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457638

The long press (which also works on macOS) is really handy when you need to enter a character that you don't already know the key combo for.

As far as I can tell there's nothing like it in Windows - if you don't know how to input a special character, you have to open Character Map - which bugs me as someone living in continental Europe but using a US keyboard.

Agreed, but pertinent to this article I do find the key combinations for ‘’ and “” slightly annoying. They’re on adjacent keys but I’d much rather shift went from single to double than from left to right. Unmodified, the keys themselves are for left and right square and curly brackets and work “correctly”

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