Personally I think that azerty was meant made by drunk students trying to troll people but it somehow caught on.
- Hey, qwerty is kinda bad… You think we could try to make one that’s even worse to mock it?
- Oooh that’d be hilarious! Let’s make a French version of qwerty but a lot worse!
- I know, lets put dead keys for all accents except for the
accent aiguso that when you need it on an uppercase letter you CAN’T type it! - Ahah good one! Let’s also not add anyway to type an uppercase cedilla! Imagine, a French keyboard that can’t type uppercase
éandç! - And what if we rearrange all the punctuation and symbols so that the open and closed parenthesis are no longer next to each other? It’d be sooo funny!
- Right right! Let’s do it too for the brackets and curly braces too!
- Good one! How about we don’t add guillemets which are used in French instead of english double quotes, so that people will be forced to type double quotes and their advanced text editors will have to automatically replace them by guillemets so that the text uses correct punctuation for French?
- That’s so sneaky! Let’s also add
§so you can cite your sources with the correct paragraph symbol, but not use real quotations marks for the quotes! - What else would be really stupid?
- Let’s use one key for a random greek letter!
- What?
- You know, like
αandβ? - Ermm… okay… which one?
αorβ? - Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let’s just pick one at random!
µit is! Has anyone even seen that letter used in a French text?- Nope, never, so it’s perfect!
- How about also adding
¤? - What the hell is
¤? - I haven’t the faintest clue! And neither do you or most people! That why it’s funny!
- Sure, why not, let’s cram pointless characters and not add actually useful ones like guillemets! Any other ideas?
- Let’s put the hyphen on the one most unreachable key!
- Oh that’s a good one!
- I got better! Let’s put the period on the same key as the semicolon, but with the semicolon as the default character, and periods will be Shift+semicolon! That way we can say that it’s canonically why French phases are long-winded: it’s easier to type a comma or semicolon than a period!
- Man you’re hilarious!
When I was still on Windows I put qwerty as my keyboard layout and used the Alt+number shortcuts for accents because that was less painful than using azerty… Those shortcuts didn’t work anymore when I switched to linux so I had to find a real solution, which ended up being a colemak base which I modified to add accented letters. I don’t like bepo, it moves z x c v and I like them being in the same place as in qwerty for the shortcuts I’m used to, and I didn’t know qwerty-fr existed at the time 😅
Do you have worse for your language?
As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops. Usually when I use a non-Thinkpad, it’s someone else’s laptop and I look like an idiot in front of them wondering why their copy and paste is broken.
I get that the function key isn’t technically a standard key on the keyboard (I’ve only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout dating back the IBM days, but it’s still annoying.
To be fair, they were the first to put a Fn key on laptops, it’s everyone else that copied them later but moved the key to a more sensible place. I still hate it though… when I bought a Thinkpad I pestered one of the vendor until he unlocked it (it was on display) and let me look around in the BIOS to see if the option to switch Ctrl and Fn was there, because I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
can confirm, it’s the worst
I actually use Coleman for work. It feels so much nicer to type on vs qwerty. It reduces same finger movement (like e & d on qwerty) and enables common synergies, like ie/ei, ne/en, sr/rs, ar, st/ts, etc. It was also easy to switch to vs other layouts like Dvorak because it keeps important hotkeys where they should be, like ctrl+a/q/z/x/c/v so you don’t accidentally close a program while trying to select all.
I still use QWERTY often for my home PC because I play games and type at the same time and don’t want to change every hot key for every game.
Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.
Oh wow that’s one unhinged layout!
Try the Canadian French layout, it’s a much saner French layout IMO.
It focuses on communication, so I use it in combination with the US layout so I can type programming-related characters.
Canadian French for programming is great. You have everything you need right there. The only downside is no euro symbol. CMS is something else. It has potential but I find the keybinds less intuitive.
CMS is arguably worse than AZERTY. Or maybe l’m just too used to AZERTY…
French here, after having to buy a Canadian laptop I can confirm I didn’t go back to the french layout. Also the “english (Canada)” locale usually has sane regionalization options (like DD/MM date and distance in meters or kilometers, celsius temperature…) compared to the other English ones
If you don’t like BÉPO because you want familiar letter-based clipboard shortcuts, you’ve already made a better layout selection impossible. I learned to use the older clipboard shortcuts: ctrl+ins for copy, shift+ins for paste, and shift+del for cut. Those are still as universally supported.
Those are not nearly as conveniently located for left handed use though. Having z x c and v all easily reachable with my left pinky on control and my right hand on my mouse tops any other benefit of another keyboard layout.
I use them fine with my left hand. There’s no reason to stay on home row if you’re doing a lot of copy and paste. Of course, if you’re doing that much copy and paste, using an extension that allows VIM shortcuts would be much faster.
I worked in France for a while and I deeply agree with everything you said… Except μ is by far the most useful Greek letter since it is used as a prefix for units of measurement, e.g. μm, μL, etc.
Also the Swiss layout is even worse, it combined all the bad features of the French and German keyboards and then just moves around all the symbols a bit more for good measure.
The Swiss German layout looks fairly reasonable in a vacuum. The ä key having 5 letter options on it is pretty wild though. The Swiss French layout is maybe better than standard French too - it’s certainly got more sensible punctuation.
This isn’t really what you asked, but I feel the need to share my experience using an alternate layout.
I used to use the Dvorak layout - for several years, in fact, and I was pretty good with it. I switched back to Qwerty, because Dvorak just caused too many issues, especially at work, and any speed gains were lost in dealing with switching the layout for tech support and things like that. Sometimes they’d remote in and type, and it would translate their keypresses incorrectly.
Now I doubt they’d even let me switch the keyboard layout (a function they don’t expect people to need, so they lock it out to reduce the chance of someone accidentally triggering it).
Qwerty does the job, I guess.
I’m similar to you. Used Dvorak for quite a while but switched back to Qwerty. I never really had any speed gains but I definitly had a lot of comfort gains.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware that could be an issue, thanks for mentioning it!
But I’m glad it’s qwerty you are stuck on, at least it is reasonably usable, even if it’s far from perfect.
Czecho-Slovak QWERTZ is fine, but it annoys me that you have to guess whether a keyboard is set to QWERTY or QWERTZ. Z and Y are the only characters that are switched. I gave up as I frequently switch to English QWERTY; now I just use QWERTY for both languages.
That’s a weirdly specific change to make to QWERTY
It happens to layouts. Some people add some small changes to make an alternate layout which makes more sense to them. For example, Colemak and Colemak-DH. DH only changes 3 keys, shifts 3, and swaps 2.
Hungarian is also QWERTZ. We have a sound written ‘sz’ and another one written ‘zs’ so it would be hard on your pinky.
Your story reminds me of diving a French car for the first time. No knob or lever can be found in the usual spaces and in the end you always end up giving a turn signal when you try to use the windscreen wiper.
I am using the German QWERTZ most of the time and found the layout rather reasonable. I once tried to learn the neo layout which had the most used letters on the middle row, but you really only can use that at home so I stopped after a week or two as it did not really seemed worth the effort.
At least with Azerty, you don’t run into it in the wild.
The worst layout is alphabetical, because sometimes you are forced to use it.
Right, that reminds me that I’m old enough to remember Minitels with alphabetical keyboards…
Some label makers use an alphabetical keyboard. It’s frustrating.
Wait really that’s still a thing? 💀
Texas instruments graphing calculators have them too.
In defence of the µ, I actually use it more than the other two, for micro- units.
The ¤ is the symbol for any currency but I have never seen it used in the wild.
I’ve seen ¤ used as a currency mark in games. Dwarf Fortress is the one that comes to mind, but I feel like I’ve seen it elsewhere as well.
Oooh I hadn’t thought about the micro units thingy and I had no idea about
¤, you do learn stuff everyday 😮I still think
ÉorÇor«or»would be more useful thoughWhen you have the Uppercase key switched on, pressing é will result in É. I’m quite sure it also works for ç and whatever
Really? With caps lock I used to get get numbers instead of é è ç. I think… it’s been a while since I’ve been forced to use azerty
On a German QWERTZ keyboard too, μ is the only Greek letter you can easily type (altgr+m) and I’m pretty sure this is because of micro units.
The real shame is that windows never had the compose key. But all these layouts come from mechanical typewriters, anyway.
It is with great reluctance that I say anything nice about Windows, but I did like the ability to type any character from its ALT+number code. Much less convenient than having a good keyboard layout or a compose key, but it’s a pretty cool feature.
On Slavic layouts, the right Alt key (AltGr) lets us type symbols like
[,],{,},&,,#,×,÷,€,đsince 0-9 is for diacritical letters by default and numbers with Shift. Still, Czech Windows users mostly use Alt codes, which is a point of friction when switching to Linux. But there, I’m happy with how I can customize the AltGr and the new AltGr+Shift layers with curly quotes, em dash, nbsp, hair space, arrows, middle dot, pi (π), pretty pi (𝛑), mu, Omega etc. My Compose key is RCtrl.
EURKEY layout is great for that. It’s basically qwerty, but all the european letters and diatrics are places meaningfully. For example ä is right ALT + a
So it’s a system like qwerty-fr ?
Grave accent ` Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). Acute accent ´ Press AltGr + key left the corresponding letter (works for the letter e). Circumflex ^ Press AltGr + key above the corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). Diaeresis ¨ Press AltGr + key below the corresponding letter (works for letters e, y, u, i, o and a). Cedilla ¸ Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for the letter c). Ligature œ/æ Press AltGr + key right the corresponding letter (works for letters o and a).Sounds like it but there is probably some differences.
I use EURKEY cause I prefer standard qwerty for programming but I frequently need all kind of european symbols due to working internationally and in multiple languages across europe.
Those parentheses and brackets are unhinged.
DK/SE layout is surprisingly good for european languages, say better than the Italian one
until you need a ^ and have to deal with dead keys
Ah yeah, right…
AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).
But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it’s faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me:
- all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter
- cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that’s exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean “ć”), same for ñ
- English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key
