Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2019 December 4

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December 4

Keyboard misbehaving - typing the wrong symbols.

My keyboard has started misbehaving. When I try to type a tilde I get | instead. When I try to type a hash I get \. When I try to type the AT sign I get ", when I try to type a pound sign I get # instead. Quotation marks give @ instead. What has happened and how can I fix it please? DuncanHill (talk) 17:08, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

You have a British keyboard but your OS thinks it is American - see British and American keyboards#Windows keyboards -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 17:18, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

I restarted my machine and it's reverted to normal. I would still be interested to know why it suddenly decided to become foreign. DuncanHill (talk) 17:29, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

There are key combinations that change keyboard layout. Depends on your operating system. Google stuff like hotkey change keyboard layout. You had a fat finger moment where you accidentally hit a magic combination. We all do that. You could explore your OS's keyboard settings and see if you can restrict which layouts are allowed so you have less of a chance of doing it again. 85.76.45.42 (talk) 17:53, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

I am amazed that your restart solved your issue, because keyboard layout can persist. You haven't mentioned your OS at all. There are many cues for international layout changes; there may be a flag icon or a two-letter country code displayed in your status bar somewhere. Most OSes with changing layouts will not omit a status indicator of this type, all it takes is the knowledge to recognize it. Elizium23 (talk) 22:38, 6 December 2019 (UTC)