The ‘¤’ character

Use a program like WhatPulse to record which keys are hit, and how many times.

After asking on the FreeNode IRC network about how to get the key frequencies together, a user lead me to this:

1. Get your text, such as a program(s), and copy them.
2. Go to http://type.trmnl.org/
3. Under the buttons, Be Sure to uncheck 'autostart with clipboard contents on paste'
4. Then, paste your program into the text box.
5. Press Cntrl+Shift+K, which will open a console.
6. Type in count_digraphs() and press Enter.

The results are read like this: "ar" 7 17 10 "ra" which means 'ar' was pressed 7 times, 'ra' was pressed 10 times, and all together 'ar' and 'ra' were pressed 17 times together

The basic Italian keyboard layout as shipped with Windows 7 has no way of typing the backtick (`) or the tilde (~). I checked this using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), with that layout loaded into it. I presume that this layout is more or less standard in Italy, though of course Microsoft might have its own oddities here.

However, in Windows 7, there is a somewhat different layout called “Italian (142)”. In it, the backtick can be typed using AltGr + and the tilde using AltGr §. Here “+” and “§” refer to the keys labeled so in the picture in the question, i.e. two keys to the right of “P” and three keys to the right of “L”. I suppose this “Italian (142)” might be some kind of “Italian programmer’s keyboard”, or just a variant keyboard, possibly reflecting different physical keyboards.

If you are using Windows (as I guess because you mentioned “Control Panel”), consider downloading MSKLC and using it to create a modified Italian keyboard layout that suits your needs, and use it as the normal layout, with no need for switching between layouts. You could e.g. make AltGr ' produce the backtick and AltGr ^ produce the tilde; these should be relatively easy to remember due to similarity of characters.

As to the “why” question (why basic Italian layout lacks those characters), I would say that keyboards are primarily designed for typing texts in natural languages, and Italian has little use for those characters. The layout has keys for à, è, ì, ò, ù, so there is no need for a backtick key acting as a dead key (diacritic key) for typing vowel + grave accent combinations, as in many other European keyboards. And while other Romance languages have letters with a tilde, like ã and ñ, Italian does not.