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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
