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?
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.
Those parentheses and brackets are unhinged.
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? 😮
no, the one you put is the “official” french canadian one, used mostly by gov, but everyday people are using the “normal” one
This is why we have not conquered the world yet :)
Do you not use BEPO ?
Ah that explains it! The other one must terrify people by its sheer overkill awesomeness!
A lot of people I know do use BEPO, but I’m not a fan :
- It doesn’t keep Z, X, C, V in the same place as QWERTY, so all the Ctrl+C shortcuts and such require different movements, and you can’t do them all with one hand easily anymore.
- I mostly type in english, so having keys dedicated to
è,ê,àandçseems a waste of keys - I don’t like that
çis a separate key at the other side of the keyboard thancand not just AltGr+C - Having punctuation in the middle of the keyboard feels weird
- In the numbers row, it keeps the inversion of numbers and symbols of AZERTY, so that the default characters are the symbols and not the numbers… it’s annoying on laptops
There’s also Ergo-L which I find a lot more sensible : https://ergol.org/ But again I have nitpicks like
Z,XandVbeing in the same place as in QWERTY… but notC😑I gave up on finding a perfect layout so I thought I might as well just use colemak as a base and edit the layout files to add the special characters I need.
I should have called this thread TEARDOWN OF EVERY KEYBOARD LAYOUT!!! (except the Canadian ones 😂 )
I’d be completely lost with BEPO…
I used QWERTY US in 80-90, it was the only available keyboard on 8bit machine (Sinclair, Amstrad, Commodore, etc), then AZERTY in 90-00 because I had a PC, then moved to Québec so since ~2000 use QWERTY FR_CA. Because of all the switch and never learning how to type, I still type with like 2 fingers :)
If you use Linux in English, en-CA is also the best locale to use, it has 24 hour time, metric units and simplified (american) language. They will conquer the world with convenience!
Oh that’s nice to know! Until know I’ve had to manually configure a different locale for language than for time and units in order to get the same effect, I might just use en-CA on the next install it sounds much simpler!
Not to cause any “offence”, but I think that “manoeuvre” would cause misspellings for you if you need to write something in American English, say a paper or a formal document. Best double check your spell checker locale, and make sure your words aren’t incorrectly “labelled” as you “centre” your text.
That one is Canadiab Multilingual Standard. Canadian French is different. Both are in common use though.
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.
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 grew up en français, albeit in Canada. In our informatique classes, we had CSA standard layout keyboards (IBM, not Microsoft).
It’s essentially a QWERTY keyboard with built-in compose key modifier and silkscreened characters on the board for accented characters (capitals included). Not too bad to learn on, and considering that QWERTY would be so prevalent in my life, I think it’s a good compromise.
When I was in uni in the 90s and finally ran across an AZERTY keyboard, I literally couldn’t use it. Not only is layout different, but the character mod sequence makes no ergonomic sense to me.
NB: fun fact, y a pas de mots qui commencent en C cédille. C’est pas pour dire qu’on a pas besoin de majuscules cédillées. :)
NBB: ¤ is an end-of-cell marker, introduced at the advent of word processors to distinguish newline and carriage returns from the ends of cells in tables. Not sure if it had a meaning before then, but my memory is saying it had something to do with sub-paragraphs.
That’s interesting, I’m glad to know people who didn’t grow up with azerty also find it awful! Someone else also mentionned CSA, it looks based… all those specials characters 🤩
And just to be nitpicky : Ça sera bientôt les vacances! There, first letter cedilla 😛
Ça sera bientôt les vacances!
En effet. Bravo!
I know that last one as the “sun” character (circle with rays coming out) but really I once learned it’s a placeholder character for “your local currency sign”.
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
Hungarian is also QWERTZ. We have a sound written ‘sz’ and another one written ‘zs’ so it would be hard on your pinky.
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.
I hate AZERTY so much it hurts my brains
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.
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.
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
Aren’t the
AandQkeys also at terrible positions?Good point I’d forgotten about that! We use
Aa lot andQalmost never so obviously we need both letters switched around so that the pinkie is on the letterQandAis harder to reach 😂
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.
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
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.
What workaround are you talking about ? I can easily type ÉÈÇÀÙ without any workaround 🤔
How do you type them then?
Capslock + the letter, thats all
