#2 Alternative to brackets

[Wathorg]

Greetings.

NNBBC is wonderful. But for users that only work with the Spanish keyboard layout (like me), and especially through laptops (like me) using Windows, it is not practical at all. Because in such conditions, it is extremely difficult to type the opening and closing brackets ( [, ] ) -- just now, I have had to try and correct four times. With my thumb on the (special for countries like Spain) Alt-gr key between the space bar and the context menu key, I have to try several times with my little finger among the diverse special keys near the Enter key. My hand hides the keys from sight. I can get curly braces, the wrong bracket, or any other character. Or, if my thumb fails to find the Alt-gr key, I get the context menu, now needing to be closed. Or, if my little finger falls on the Enter or the Backspace keys, re-editing is necessary to correct. All of the above typing mistakes happen often, too very often, even to a blindtypist like me able to otherwise type 300 words per minute. To create a text with 20 or 30 lines including, say, columns tags, quotes, a few colours, and a couple of links, I have spent 9 hours.

In such conditions, purely accidental but potentially including millions or maybe billions of possible users, no sane Spaniard would ever use NBBC. I have to. I need to. If other characters could alternatively be used (even an escape sequence) more adapted to this kind of keyboards and their corresponding software keyboard layouts, that text would have taken at most half an hour.

I, thus, politely request --not just for me, but for possibly much of the non-English-typing market in the world-- an alternative to brackets. I would be content with using << instead of the opening bracket ( [ ) and >> instead of the closing bracket ( ] ). But not with having to use curly braces, requiring the same (but even more twisted) kind of contorted, unnatural typing.

Yours hopefully,

Wathorg