The relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it.

The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which had a beige variant for Germany and Germany only, to conform with local laws that prescribed and enforced specific color and contrast combinations for keyboards, in order to avoid glare and attendant ergonomic problems for terminal operators in the decades before. (It wasn’t just Apple. ThinkPads did the same.)

(I know. Jump scare!)

But you’ll understand that what caught more of my attention was an obscure variant of keyboards for (parts of?) Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The white 2003 keyboard might be my favourite of Apple’s keyboard design, instantly recognizable in either the American version (more words), or the European one (more symbols):

There was also the Japanese JIS standard keyboard, which famously kept Control where older terminals had it – to, no doubt, delight of Japan’s programmers:

These are the three well-known layout standards. The one for Canada followed Europe, but only to a point. The layout was the same, but the symbols weren’t:

Here’s an alternate view of the European and Canadian keyboards, and you can see that the latter one introduces different, unique symbols for Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Caps Lock…

…and even goes as far as Esc. (The Esc symbol is roughly the same you see worldwide, but for some reason, Apple always shied away from putting it on even symbol-friendly keyboards – even though frustratingly it’s being used in macOS menus in all the locales.)

The story repeats itself in the middle of the keyboard. Here are, again, the US and European editions…

Canada, with its abundance of icons, makes Europe feel like America:

Even the arrows are different – here’s America vs. Canada:

Even the Enter arrow – here’s Europe vs. Canada:

And numeric Enter/​Return gets a different shape, too:

I don’t really know what is the full story here. I imagine the government exerted some pressure and Apple relented, creating a unique set of keyboards with some really ugly icons.

I know the previous two models were affected also – here’s AppleDesign keyboard from the second half of the 1990s:

You can see all the same symbols…

…and even the extra glyph for Num Lock I imagine was prescribed for the PC side, too:

And, closer to the present, I have seen examples of the first metal keyboard from the late 2000s, too. But I don’t believe these symbols are used today. Even in their heyday, I’m not sure whether they were sold in the whole of Canada, or just its French-speaking portion – if you know, please share.

It’s my understanding this is called the CSA or ACNOR keyboard. And, like before, these symbols are in Unicode – ⇬⇭⎆⎈⇱⇲⎗⎘ – looking just as gorgeous.

That was me being sarcastic. I can imagine the pain inside Apple of someone having to put the ugly symbols coming from above, alongside otherwise generally thoughtful and refined typography. Sure, Apple did good here compared to other keyboard makers, but still, it must have hurt. This is what makes these keyboards so interesting to me.

But there’s one more symbol that might be interesting to talk about, and perhaps you already spotted it above. It’s here, on the Japanese keyboard:

This time around no standard was involved; I believe that the pencil on the Control key is solely Apple’s invention.

What is it for, and why was it there just in Japan? Typing in Japanese might be among the most complex, requiring switching between a few writing systems – katakana, hiragana, kanji, and also Western letters – as fluently as possible. To help with that, Apple used a system called Kotoeri, and added a new alternative symbol for Control that was also present onscreen, in the relevant typing menus:

The system was there in the waning years of classic Mac OS and early years of Mac OS X.

Just like with the Canadian symbols, I don’t fully know what happened to Kotoeri. I’m reading that it was gone from Mac OS X by 2014 – but even already in the years before, Apple removed the slightly pixellated symbol from their keyboards, and switched back to a standard ⌃ Control symbol in the UI.

Of course, if in the 1990s it was people in Japan who had to switch between various keyboards all time, today, thanks to emoji, it is everyone. If the Kotoeri pencil reminds you of something, Apple came back to the same well more recently with the 🌐/Fn key – but I already wrote how much I hate that.

An interesting 20-minute Config talk from the Instagram designer Rose McManus:

It covers some of the same areas we recently talked about: diacritics and Polish S (and a fun video about English conventions from a while back), but it tackles them on a higher level. McManus talks about how people express themselves via their usernames, how that changes in various countries of the world and for what reasons, how it intersects with some UI considerations, and how people use it creatively – and also, sometimes, abuse it.

This is the K-pop star IU. Uh her Instagram handle is “dlwlrma.” And I think at first this maybe seems already like complete hyperreality, like it’s bearing no relationship with her Hangul name, or even with her stage name. But actually, I think this is at the third stage of Baudrillard’s theory because really “dlwlrma” is Lee Ji-eun’s Hangul name typed out on a Korean keyboard but backwards, distorted, while that keyboard is set to render Latin characters, almost like a cipher. And then her display name is her Hangul name typed out with one of the characters changed, so it’s like a pun.

I didn’t feel the talk stuck the landing – in the end, I wasn’t very sure why the decision that was made was made. But there’s a whole lot of stuff before that was fascinating and thought-provoking.

Speaking of remastering (and diacritics), I grabbed my older Medium deep dive called The curious case of the disappearing Polish S, and put it on the new site.

It looks so much better than on Medium and while I was at it, I’ve redone all the visuals, and updated it a little bit.)

It’s still probably one of my favourite bugs to encounter. I hope you enjoy!

Chrome’s find option, like every search coming from a good home, does something clever with accented characters – it normalizes them:

No matter whether you search with a proper accented character, or with its basic Latin equivalent, all the same stuff matches: The “ø” letter is treated the same as “o” both in the input field, and then in the search itself.

Yet, Chrome’s tab search inexplicably doesn’t do that, which confused me when working on a post about diacritics earlier this week. Here, it should match all four open tabs:

Tab search was introduced years ago; the Occam’s Razor says this isn’t a recent bug, but that the feature has always behaved like this. I filed the bug, but even if it gets fixed quickly, I think this doesn’t reflect well on Chrome’s team. If the right code already exists for ⌘F, why not reuse it? If it cannot be reused, why not repurpose at least its unit tests or the QA process to make sure this doesn’t fall through the cracks? Normalization should be treated as a core property of any search, rather than an optional “nice to have.”

But, Marcin, didn’t you just invalidate your assertion that diacritics actually matter? After all, wouldn’t you input “nestlé” instead of “nestle” if they did?

To this, I have a few answers:

• Input is not output. This is no different than autocorrect, autocomplete, or other IME helpers.
• The very fact that on many keyboards accented characters are hard to input is itself a sign of anglo-centrism of companies that made early typewriters (Remington, which established a lot of European layouts like QWERTZ and AZERTY, employed a person who bragged he didn’t actually speak any languages in a “how hard could it be” way) and then most microcomputers.
• There is this really interesting rule, also known as Postel’s Law: “be conservative in what you output, but liberal in what you accept as input.” It’s not universally applicable – sometimes it’s better to teach the user to be more explicit if it benefits them in the longer run – but it feels appropriate to me here.

Why does it matter specifically for the ⌘F and the tab search experience? I have this personal theory: the simplest the search, the more the users will blame themselves if it doesn’t work, and assume the tab or the string just isn’t there, rather than rewrite their query. That’s what happened to me. I assumed that the tab wasn’t open and tried to get to it again, wasting time and effort.

The rule might be universally true for any UI surface – the tighter it gets, the less likely we assume it can break. After all, there is a manual for a typewriter, but there isn’t one for the pencil! And these UIs do feel positively basic; they are small windows with basically one input field and an immediate as-you-type reaction.

The iOS 26 update introduced a bug in the Czech keyboard. Instead of the customary háček (ǍǎĚěǦǧǏǐǑǒǓǔY̌y̌) in the bottom row, another key was duplicated, removing access to the accent character (or, a diacritic) very popular in that language.

Here is the before and after of this situation:

Ordinarily, this can be frustrating but not insurmountable; you can always copy/​paste, rely on autocorrect to help out, or even add some topical text replacements for common phrases. The problem is that this bug only appeared on the keyboard used for logging on, and at least a few people used that character in their password. There, none of these workarounds were available – and so those people were now completely locked out of their iPhones.

The Register reported on this on April 12, and a few days later suggested that Apple was working on a fix. I won’t keep you in suspense; I just verified that the fix landed with the recent May 11 update.

This is, in an of itself, not a fascinating story, but with interesting things to talk about at its periphery.

First of all, The Register never showed a single screenshot. This led to a lot of confusion and speculation in the comments. Turns out, screenshots are valuable not just with bug reporting, but also with bug reporting.

Second, check out this Czech keyboard. Even within the limitations of the ancient QWERTY, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. Two new accented keys just appear on the top layer when you switch to Czech. Both have magical properties, too. They’re the modern “dead keys” that either stand alone, or get combined with the previous letter if that makes sense.

This is the stuff typewriters, and even desktop keyboards, could only dream of. But, as always, more software means more bugs, including some with unforeseen consequences; a typewriter could never break this way.

Thirdly, there is this interesting tension between us being led to believe “more interesting passwords are safer,” but then sometimes being penalized for actually making them interesting. A decade ago someone used emoji in their password without realizing they won’t be able to input it, and I’m sure there were other examples.

But the most interesting, to me, part? It’s the diacritic itself. Under one of the posts, a commenter wrote:

Stick with the 7-bit ASCII subset. You will never go wrong.

7-bit ASCII basically means “26 Western letters and nothing else.”

I hate this. I know it’s objectively true – in the late 1980s I felt a sense of relief my name didn’t have any of Polish language’s nine diacritics, which would complicate my life. Even just yesterday in Germany, I spotted this:

Software still struggles beyond ASCII. But this is why we need to keep pushing. Diacritical characters are to be found everywhere in the world. They’re detailed, and varied, and filled with histories. Umlaut is not diaeresis. Kreska is not the acute. A háček is not a breve. They’re rarely optional decoration, and often not even decoration at all; learning about Turkish dotless i might completely upend your understanding of what’s an accent and what is not.

If you don’t have a favourite diacritic, you are missing out. Even the names – grave! ogonek! horn! – are beautiful. (Háček is also known as caron and a wedge depending on context, and in other regions referred to with beautiful words kvačica and strešica.)

If you’re interested, here is David J. Ross’s 22-minute talk about getting to love diacritics from the perspective of a type designer. It’s filled with craft and playfulness:

My favourite accent is, obviously, ogonek. Just looking at Adam Twardoch’s guide on how it should be drawn fills my heart with joy:

An entertaining 9-minute video by Shloop that starts with a common mistake of typing in an English mode on a Korean keyboard, but then goes through a bunch of other fun and light input internationalization stories:

This is the page for non-English programming languages that is shown at some point. Quite a bit of stuff in there.

Oh, also, in Polish (my native tongue), spitting is “tfu.”