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.
Not really, but I switched from Qwerty to Workman years ago, though I can live with Qwerty if I have to when it’s on someone else’s machine.
I use Workman because I found Colemak rather hard to learn, mostly because of the position of S being one over from where it was on Qwerty.
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!
can confirm, it’s the worst
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.
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 thoughThe 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.
Linux (and I think maybe even macOS) can do Ctrl+Shift+U, and then you type the Unicode hex number.
When 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
Depends on the keyboard mapping (there are multiple azertys)
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.
As an azerty user, I don’t see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It’s super easy to do on linux, no?
Having to use workarounds for your keyboad layout to be usable means that it’s a bad keyboard layout
There are several Azerty layouts. Some don’t allow you to type uppercase accented letters easily, some do. I’ve switched to Linux about fifteen years ago and never had an issue typing these characters with the default layout. It used to be more complicated on Windows, I don’t know if that’s still the case. I should give it a try the next time I get the occasion to type on a Windows computer.
I currently use the fr-oss Azerty layout, which is probably not perfect but has many advantages. I love being able to type thin spaces and non breaking spaces easily. The diagram doesn’t explain it, but combining the é/2 key with the Capslock key will give you an É — whereas combining it with the Maj key will give you a 2. That’s the mechanism Gueoris is alluding to here.
I still don’t get why it’s easier to type a semi-colon than a full stop, though. I love semi-colons, but even I don’t use them that much.
OMG they made Caps Lock actually useful? 😮
French Canadian keyboard is QWERTY but with all kind of symbol, like the 1 to = top row can give
with shift !"/$%?&*()_+
with altcar ±@£¢¤¬¦²³¼½¾
We also have the µ¯§¶«»°
and we can do all kind of Èîöç etc
Is that the one?
You have
« »and all the accents? 🤯You even have
OEandAE? 😭So there’s an ACTUALLY usable keyboard for French but no one in France even knows it exists because it’s not metropolitan French? Why am I not surprised 😑
You even have division and multiplication symbols and FRACTIONS and every symbol that you might ever need? 😭 😭 😭
And it seems like it would work well for English, French and German?
How have you not conquered the world yet? 😮
That one is Canadiab Multilingual Standard. Canadian French is different. Both are in common use though.
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.
You should be able to use the Compose key on Linux for easy typing of accented characters. eg. Compose ’ e = é
I’m not sure what the Compose key is. Is it an additional modifier you need to define?
Yes. You choose the compose key in your DE settings (usually right alt key), then you can press it and type compose sequences to insert unusual symbols or strings.
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
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 order for them to be allowed on exams, I ghink they’re required to have a non-QWERTY layout.
