We had this discussion in
another thread recently.
As much as I hate the idea of losing a key, I do believe the US layout is better, with fewer compromises.
...
It has large shift keys. A large Enter key within easy reach. A large backspace key. What's not to like? Nothing that can't be fixed by remapping a few keys to personal preference.
Apart from the fact that the whole layout is a farce anyway - unless you're a really good typist you're going to be using the backspace key far more than the enter key - I feel the UK layout is marginally superior.
The left shift is clearly superior on the UK keyboard. I gave diagrams in
a post in the other thread but to summarise it's just as easy to hit as the right shift key as it's in the same position it just looks smaller than the right shift because it doesn't need to extend as far back - the right shift needs to do shift + # or shift + \ which would be awkward if it was short but the left side doesn't have any keys behind tab/caps lock that might be to be hit with shift. Plus this properly sized shift instead of the oversized US one allows an extra key which is never bad and that extra key happens to be ideally placed for use in games.
The right-side is debateable, the UK enter is certainly easy enough to hit from the home row and in these days of word wrap we only need it once per paragraph rather than once per line when writing prose so having an extra key there may be more useful but it's used often enough to confirm selections and for certain types of writing like coding, poetry and one line chatting that I can understand why some people like to have it close in.
I can't see the point of the US layout having the rightmost keys stretched though, why isn't the \ key a normal key size and the others shortened appropriately? I guess it's so the ANSI keyboards can use the same case as ISO and JIS keyboards, which isn't a bad thing but does make the layout look wierd.
Ultimately, I wouldn't worry about switching. The loss of the \ key next to shift might annoy you for a while, but for gaming you can usually get on with having only 10 keys instead of 11 around the wasd cluster.
Historically I doubt your interpretation of wikipedia's EBCDIC mention as large numbers of other countries adopted the same layout including those using a different alphabet like Russia and Greece.
Interestingly many of the early iconic US computers like the IBM PC and PC-XT and Apple II used a enter closer to the UK style while iconic UK computers like the ZX Spectrum and BBC Microcomputer used the US style enter so how we ended up the other way round I don't know.
