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?
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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 thoughEURKEY 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.
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.
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)
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? 😮
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!
Having the default spell check as en_ca would be a problem through. I’d have an “axe” to grind in this case, as I challenge the “honour” of hunspell. I usually just manually choose metric units and a 24 hour clock on top of en_US.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn’t insane
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😂
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.
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…
eille wow non étant Français, AZERTY c’est cool :)
¤ is the currency symbol
