International keyboard layouts in 2017

Marcin Wichary
5 min readMar 21, 2017

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This is a list of all the international Apple Magic Keyboards I could find, from U.S. to Japanese.

If you use any of these keyboards, please let me know what I missed or misinterpreted by leaving a note, or talking to me on Twitter!

A video with all the 25 keyboards

Specific keyboards, ordered by how different they are from the U.S. one

  • The standard American English layout.
  • Symbols instead of Shift, Caps Lock, Delete, Tab, and Enter labels.
  • Extra key with ± and §.
  • Tilde key and backslash key in different places, Enter in a different shape.
  • Extra label.
  • Extra £ label.
  • Many new letters around Enter.
  • Interesting quotation key in the upper-left corner. What does it do?
  • A lot of punctuation is different. Braces and curly brackets are missing.
  • Even more keys with letters.
  • @ on Q.
  • Many keys with triple labels.
  • Similar keys as above, but in different locations.
  • Misprinted @. (Possibly in the mock-up, not on the actual keyboard?)
  • Exact same glyphs as above, but in different locations.
  • Similar to above, somewhat differently designed.
  • Many triple-labeled keys.
  • Backslash key in the upper left corner.
  • on E. Why?
  • Extra letter keys on the left and the right
  • Slash, blackslash, and pipe in the upper left
  • Guillemets (« and ») on Z and X, and a few other keys with tertiary punctuation
  • Interesting side-by-side keys.
  • @ on G. Why?
  • ! not on 1.
  • Try to find a zero!!!
  • A nice block of letters close to Enter.
  • All digits are shifted!
  • Most accented letters are under digits.
  • on R and eszett on S.
  • Cyrillic coexisting with Roman alphabet.
  • Some keys have four labels.
  • A key with
  • Ruble (currency) sign on P.
  • Korean alphabet (Hangul) coexisting with Roman alphabet — sometimes two letters per key.
  • Otherwise, identical to the U.S. keyboard, including American labels and Enter shape.
  • George Wyatt tells me: “The Taiwanese keyboard has 2 different ways to type Chinese. Top right symbols are Zhuyin where you type the pronunciation, bottom right is Cangjie where you type words based on their shape. I think most Taiwanese just use the Zhuyin.”
  • Thai alphabet coexisting with Roman, two on most keys.
  • Some punctuation signs on letter keys.
  • American labels and Enter shape.
  • Arabic script coexisting with Roman alphabet.
  • Arabic labels alongside English labels.
  • Bidirectional labels on Tab, Enter, and Backspace.
  • Second, mirrored question mark. (Originally, I complained that there was no mirrored exclamation mark, and someone pointed out that it would look exactly the same.)
  • Interesting representation of accents on Q, W, E, R keys.
  • The entire layout is shifted, resulting in big Enter, big 1, small Esc, big Eject. (Big Enter is apparently crucial since Japanese keyboard entry uses it to select characters.)
  • Hiragana and Roman alphabets coexisting on keys, sometimes up to three a key.
  • Smaller space surrounded by two extra keys to switch between Hiragana and Roman.
  • Control in a place of Caps Lock; Caps Lock in a place of Fn; Fn replaces the right Alt.

That’s it! Except…

Bonus: 17 iPad Smart Keyboard layouts

Enjoy!

Thanks to Xah Lee and Paris Marx for their help on this article.

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