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?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn’t insane
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.
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”.
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!
How to spot a canadian that just started using a computer: they end questions with É
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.
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.
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 😂
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? 😮
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
