alt Hacker NewsI'm Portuguese and have lived in the UK for over a decade.
UK keyboard layouts suck for writing Portuguese, because they lack convenient ways to type all the diacritics. Portuguese layouts (especially on macOS) suck horrendously for programming (curly braces and square brackets are inordinately annoying to type).
These days, all my physical keyboards are US (ANSI) layouts, and I use the US International (with dead keys) layout exclusively. It's the only relatively sane option that allows me to write both code and all the natural languages I'm liable to write on any given day (read: English, Portuguese, and some random French or German loanwords here and there).
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As a Brazilian fellow, 100% agreed. US international is the least bad compromise I've found. I can't say I mind the dead keys too much. And I do enjoy that all combinations are sensible (i.e. key for the symbol + key for the letter). Memorizing the (not quite random but not exactly 100% logical either) position for some of the diacritics would be very annoying to me.
I guess I don't mind it too much because the standard portuguese keyboard layout also rely on dead keys for accented letters, instead of having dedicated keys for them. (Or at least the Brazilian Portuguese layout does, not sure about the European Portuguese layout). So that's just what I've always been used to.
I speak English and French at work and I use an ANSI US keyboard frequently, but the laptop itself is on AZERTY. I keep three layouts : French AZERTY, Normal US and US International. When typing code or English, it's the US layout, then I switch to International when speaking French. AZERTY only if I don't have my keyboard with me