Hacker News Reader

Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

I’m Finnish. The caret is not always easy to type in my experience on international keyboards. Not sure what the added value is of creating yet another convention here, as there are so many already with each new templating language.

View on HN

I spent a lot of time in C# and ASP.Net, and I was struck by how closely this resembled Razor syntax, but with ^ instead of @. Switching to @ would make it slightly more familiar to that cohort, and it might even be possible to build on some Razor-parsing code for editor plugins or whatever.

I was inspired in part by Razor, although I'm not a C#/ASP.net developer. I just liked the way it looked and worked from examples I saw.

I actually started with @ [1] but changed to ^ for 2 reasons: having to escape for email addresses (although in retrospect maybe it's not such a problem), and the admittedly cheeky ^ being the "up" in "Pushup" :^)

[1] https://github.com/adhocteam/pushup/commit/04aa00bb5401bc93b...

That's good feedback, thank you. My US-centric eye didn't consider that.

Same on a French keyboard, trying to type `^if {` will result in `îf {`

Oh yes it's pretty hard to type on a German keyboard as well. In most editors you will need two keystrokes.

But don't you need 4 keystrokes for the common alternative, {} enclosed template expressions? Same as french, nordic, and probably lots of other european intl layouts.

(Or even better against the {{ }} ones requiring 6)

"{" on a french keyboard is two key presses but at the same time (alt gr and 4), while ^ is two key presses one after the other, which makes it a bit slower. Most editors will also insert the corresponding } when you create a {. That makes in my experience {} faster than ^ and {{}} as fast as ^.

{} is still a common complaint in my circle of programmer friends and everyone has seriously thought even once about switching to an english/american keyboard, but then there's the issue of switching back when writing stuff in french (é by itself almost ruins the idea).

I use a Spanish keyboard but with US layout on top. I normally let autocorrect deal with special Spanish characters, but just switch layout if I’m writing something longer.

For German devs it makes sense to use a no dead keys keyboard layout IMHO. You rarely need the accents anyways and it saves a lot of time when coding. I made the switch a long time ago and don't regret it. For the occasional word like "Expose", I just leave off the accent and that's that.

same in french. it's a dead key on our keyboard, so it's basically two keystrokes instead of one to type it.

to be fair most special characters are behind AltGr on azerty, soooo...

Interestingly, there's no such problem on Cyrillic keyboards despite being a totally different alphabet. We only need to switch the current layout to English which is what we do all the time anyway.

Not despite, because. You need to switch to type in any other alphabet, so you switch to English. German, French keyboards work perfectly well for English, it’s just that the symbols are not as easy to reach.

Personally, I use and love EurKEY [0] as I rarely type in German anyway and rather optimize for coding.

[0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

Admittedly ^ on a US keyboard also involves two keys.

OTOH I have an actual Finnish keyboard and caret is simply Shift-umlaut (the key has a caret over a pair of dots).

You still need to press space after that.

Ah. True dat.

Many templating engines allow to customize the delimiters. Quite useful sometimes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com