The UK variant of the
Enhanced keyboard commonly used with
personal computers designed for
Microsoft Windows differs from the US layout as follows: • The UK keyboard has 1 more key than the U.S. keyboard (UK=62, US=61, on the typewriter keys, 102 v 101 including function and other keys, 105 vs 104 on models with Windows keys) • The extra key is added next to the
Enter key to accommodate (
number sign) and (
tilde) • The
Alt key to the right of the
space bar is replaced by an
AltGr key • The (
pound sign) takes the place vacated by the number sign on the key • The (
negation) takes the place vacated by tilde on the (
grave accent) key • produces • produces (
broken bar, shown as a secondary symbol) • (
Euro sign) is produced by and is shown as a secondary symbol • and are swapped (to and , respectively) • The key is moved to the left of the key ( still produces ) • The Enter key spans two rows, and is narrower to accommodate the #/~ key • AltGr+vowel produces the
acute accent variant of that vowel as needed for
Irish.
Diacritics used in
Scots Gaelic and
Welsh require the
UK extended keyboard setting. • Some UK keyboards do not label
Backspace,
Enter,
Tab and
Shift in words Early versions of Windows handled both the differences between the two keyboards and the differences between
American English and
British English by having two English language options — a UK setting and a US setting. While adequate for users in the
United States,
United Kingdom, and
Ireland, this solution caused difficulty in other English-speaking countries. In many English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g.,
Canada,
Australia, the
Caribbean nations,
Hong Kong,
Malaysia,
India,
Pakistan,
Bangladesh,
Singapore,
New Zealand, and
South Africa),
orthography has traditionally conformed more closely to
British English usage, while these countries have chosen to use the
United States keyboard layout. People in these countries were as a result required to choose a system setting inconsistent with their localised version of English, thereby causing traditional British English to fall out of favour. This is particularly evident with spelling, where words such as "colour" and "centre" are flagged as being spelled incorrectly by word processing software when the operating system is set to the US setting. However, in more recent editions of Windows, the number of 'settings' options was increased, allowing users to select the correct keyboard and
language variety independently. For example, one is given a number of default options for locality that will usually correctly match keyboard and language variety. Further, even if the physical keyboard is not the same as the keyboard layout used on system, it can be changed without changing the language variety.
International or extended keyboard layouts Extended keyboard layout Since the default US keyboard layout in Microsoft Windows offers no way of inputting any sort of diacritic or accent, this makes it unsuitable for all but a handful of languages unless the US International layout is used. The
US International layout changes the (grave), (tilde), (
circumflex), (
double quote, to make
diaeresis), and (
apostrophe, to make
acute accent) keys into
dead keys for producing accented characters: thus for example (release) will produce . The US International layout also uses the right alt (AltGr) as a modifier to enter special characters. The equivalent mapping for UK/Irish keyboards is called the "UK Extended" layout which, if activated in
settings, will allow the user to enter a wide variety of diacritics (such as grave accents) which are not accommodated by the standard UK/Irish layout. In particular, à,è,ì,ò,ù used in
Scots Gaelic can be made (using , release and then the vowel), the ŵ and ŷ used in
Welsh (using (^), release, then etc.). Likewise, the Spanish and Portuguese letters ñ and õ can be made (using (~), release, then etc.). For more specialized uses, there is a facility in Windows for users to create a customized layout that may match their needs more precisely. ==Apple Macintosh keyboards==