AZERTY layout? WTF?!

[ch_123]

I had the misfortune of using a French keyboard the other day. The numbers in the main block are swapped with the shifted functions, so in order to type "1", you have to press shift and 1, and just pressing that button gives you the symbol that you'd assume would be the shifted character.

Maybe it's something to do with the metric system?

[VentiLator]

Maybe it's something to do with the é, è, ç and à,?

[Azuremen]

And the whole ton of words in French that start with "Q"

I never had too many issues using one though while I was in France, just took a moments thought from time to time.

[Keymonger]

Maybe it's something to do with the metric system?

Show Image

Or maybe it has something to do with, you know, their language? The French also have their own version of Dvorak, bepo. The Swedish have Svorak, and I think there's some more layouts. IMO, layout diversity is only a good thing.

[ch_123]

The top row does include some accented letters, but it seems odd to have them there and not somewhere on the main block. The right hand side, and bottom row of the AZERTY layout has some symbols that are probably used much less than things like é or the c with the cedilla accent.

That accounts for like three-four of the keys on the number row. The rest are things like brackets, hash, ampersand, and I really don't think prioritizing them over numbers has anything to with specifics of the French language or diversity or whatever, I think it's just a very bad design decision, especially on a laptop with no numpad (which was the scenario I encountered it in).

[Moschops]

And there's that other layout they had too. So they could have one for executives and one for secretaries.

[patrickgeekhack]

I love the country, I love the food, I love the culture and I love the language. However, I HATE the keyboard layout. Some of the French people I've met hate the layout too.

[sam113101]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Canadian_French_.28QUEBEC.29
Canadian French is better than azerty, though nothing is better than bépo for french-writing

[keyb_gr]

I love the country, I love the food, I love the culture and I love the language. However, I HATE the keyboard layout. Some of the French people I've met hate the layout too.

From Wikipedia:

Some French people use the Canadian Multilingual standard keyboard. The Portuguese (Portugal) keyboard layout may also be preferred, as it provides all French accents (acute, grave, diaeresis, circumflex, cedilla, and also French quotation marks or guillemets, «») and its dead-letter option for all the accent keys allow for easy input of all the possibilities in French and most other languages (áàäãâéèëêíìïîóòöõôúùüû). Ç is, however, a separate key, as can be seen above. The US-International keyboard is also used for the same reason.

What fun.

Usage stats for AZERTY do look pretty lousy:

Horizontally it's no worse than average QWERTY but vertically, oh boy.

For comparison, for a German QWERTZ typewriter layout, Rohmert cites
LH: 57.9% RH: 42.1%
Rows:
48.6%
31.8% <-- Home
19.6%
... which no doubt is not great, but sure better than French/AZERTY.

[rantenki]

I love the country, I love the food, I love the culture and I love the language. However, I HATE the keyboard layout. Some of the French people I've met hate the layout too.

Yeah, I had the same experience. Was in Paris for some consulting work, and whenever I had to drive on somebody's laptop, it was PAINFUL to use (and I speak French just fine). In the datacenter though, no problems. There were NO azerty layouts on any server I touched.

[D-EJ915]

I had the misfortune of being forced to use the belgian azerty layout in a VM before, I tried every key to find the stupid / haha.  I think most people would probably have a fit if they used one of my computers since I use the canadian french layout.  I have a few CF keyboards but most are USA...

[hoggy]

That accounts for like three-four of the keys on the number row. The rest are things like brackets, hash, ampersand, and I really don't think prioritizing them over numbers has anything to with specifics of the French language or diversity or whatever, I think it's just a very bad design decision, especially on a laptop with no numpad (which was the scenario I encountered it in).

I modified the layout of one of my Access boards to almost the same thing, I type the symbols more often than the numbers, but the board has a numpad as well - so my change wasn't as radical.

[patrickgeekhack]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Canadian_French_.28QUEBEC.29
Canadian French is better than azerty, though nothing is better than bépo for french-writing

I don't doubt that bépo can be very good for French writing, however, for those who type both English and French everyday, US-International is the way to go.

Yeah, I had the same experience. Was in Paris for some consulting work, and whenever I had to drive on somebody's laptop, it was PAINFUL to use (and I speak French just fine). In the datacenter though, no problems. There were NO azerty layouts on any server I touched.

I was working as a Visual Basic programmer during my first three visits to France. I would just set my layout to US-International on my computer, but would go crazy when I needed to use someone else's computer like you said.

[Henry]

French is my mother tongue, but fortunately here in Switzerland we use our own QWERTZ variation which is nowhere as bad as AZERTY. I switched to QWERTY US (International) a few years ago when I started typing more code and English than French.

AZERTY is dumb on so many levels:
- There is no dead acute accent (let alone a dead cedilla) making the input of É or Ç a bit hard if caps lock behaves like shift lock. Thanks to typewriters and silly operating systems, most French people believe that there is no need to put diacritics on capitalized letters, which is a mistake.
- . requires to use shift.
- While I understand the rationale behind the shifted numbers row (for "pure text" input, & é " ' ( - è _ ç à ) are probably more used than numbers), touch-typing this row is cumbersome in my opinion, even though I'm probably biased here. Other non-English layouts tend to put accented letters under the right pinky...
- ... where not so useful characters are assigned. Especially ù which is used in only one word (a pretty common one though: où, meaning where). µ on the third layer wouldn't be too shocking, like on german QWERTZ for example, but here it's on the second layer.

[British]

I actually tried bépo for a week or two...
Since I'm no touch-typist, learning bépo was even more harder, to the point where I dropped it altogether.
After all, I don't type that much, and when not typing heavily, I'm having only one hand on the keyboard (just in case: the other in on the mouse, mkay ?), so I don't see myself put both hands on just to feel the nubs and type one or two keys.
Having a bépo layout on keys would then help, but that's another story.

As crappy as AZERTY may be, when you've used it all you life, well, you use it.

Regarding going US-international... I'd probably miss the accents (I don't remember the specifics of that layout though... and am too lazy to look it up).

Not using capitalized diacritics, a mistake ?
Most probably, but to be honest, whatever text I come across, there's a good chance they're not used, so no big deal.

[gilgam]

bépo is a very nice layout but the lack of adapted keyboards, and the leraning curve which is steep male it hard to be adopted.

it's a pity.

[beepbeep_]

Been using azerty my entire life, started using qwerty UK layout since yesterday.

I miss my é

Also, fml for ordering without looking at what layout I was ordering

[Ascaii]

Been using azerty my entire life, started using qwerty UK layout since yesterday.

I miss my é

Also, fml for ordering without looking at what layout I was ordering

German ISO has the accents next to the backspace

[British]

Been using azerty my entire life, started using qwerty UK layout since yesterday.

I miss my é

Also, fml for ordering without looking at what layout I was ordering

OK that's old stuff, but maybe my question will not be that outdated in the end...

So, you're using QWERTY because you bought a QWERTY keyboard ?
If that's the case, you'd probably better off getting some french (or even belgian) keyset off eBay or some specific german retailers.

Now, if you stay with QWERTY on purpose, that's another story

[Dr.Pepper]

When I took french last year I just used the US International layout. And my french teacher had the keyboard on her computer in AZERTY, which was really annoying when she asked me to fix a problem with the mouse not working. Oh and by the way I failed french

[ch_123]

Been using azerty my entire life, started using qwerty UK layout since yesterday.

I miss my é

Also, fml for ordering without looking at what layout I was ordering

Change your OS's keyboard layout to Irish. Alt-Gr + e is é. The button to the left of one is a dead key. Press it, and then press a vowel to get the accent grave.

[keyboardlover]

Irish words freak me out. Like "fuinneamh".

[FunkTrooper]

I've never understood the Irish layout. All it adds to the UK layout is the ability to type grave accents by making ` a dead key (and introducing horrible bugs to games which use that key to bring up the console!)

However, the Irish language does not include any grave accents. The only diacritic in the language is the acute accent, or “fada”, which can be typed on a UK layout with Alt Gr.

So why does the Irish layout exist?!?

[JBert]

OK that's old stuff, but maybe my question will not be that outdated in the end...

So, you're using QWERTY because you bought a QWERTY keyboard ?
If that's the case, you'd probably better off getting some french (or even belgian) keyset off eBay or some specific german retailers.

Now, if you stay with QWERTY on purpose, that's another story

Or rather use Colemak in case you still need to program. It's got enough dead keys on the AltGr layer and yet keeps the programming stuff on the normal layer.

[Ekaros]

Change your OS's keyboard layout to Irish. Alt-Gr + e is é. The button to the left of one is a dead key. Press it, and then press a vowel to get the accent grave.

Damm, they can't make anything logical. Alt Gr + e is € in FI-layout, but so is Alt Gr + 5...