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 aigu so 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 é and ç !
  • 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 α and β?
  • Ermm… okay… which one? α or β?
  • Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let’s just pick one at random!
  • µ it 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?

  • Chris@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    You should be able to use the Compose key on Linux for easy typing of accented characters. eg. Compose ’ e = é

      • vort3@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • skami@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    At some point, uppercase letters were written without accent in French. I’m unsure where this comes from, but I heard this was due to the limitations of printing presses, and then typewriters kept the convention.

    In any case, the style is quite out of fashion today, but I know people who still write (handwriting and typing) without using accented uppercase letters.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 months ago

      Writing unaccented uppercase? TO THE STAAAAAAKE!

      The heretics must burn 🔥 🔥 🔥

      (I might possibly need therapy to get over French schools teachings about what constitutes “correct French”)

    • nyan@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, that’s how I was taught in school in Canada in the 1980s, although no one ever explained why. It always did seem odd.

  • lemonuri@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • JohnDumpling@beehaw.org
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • Hule@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Hungarian is also QWERTZ. We have a sound written ‘sz’ and another one written ‘zs’ so it would be hard on your pinky.

  • Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 months ago

      Good point I’d forgotten about that! We use A a lot and Q almost never so obviously we need both letters switched around so that the pinkie is on the letter Q and A is harder to reach 😂

  • limelight79@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • Troz@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • guillem@aussie.zone
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 months ago

      Oooh I hadn’t thought about the micro units thingy and I had no idea about ¤, you do learn stuff everyday 😮

      I still think É or Ç or « or » would be more useful though

      • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The real shame is that windows never had the compose key. But all these layouts come from mechanical typewriters, anyway.

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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          2 months ago

          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.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lol
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        2 months ago

        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

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
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          2 months ago

          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).
          
          • HelloRoot@lemy.lol
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            2 months ago

            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.

    • Malgas@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • brianary@startrek.website
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Troz@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • brianary@startrek.website
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.website
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    2 months ago

    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.