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?

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      I want to argue and defend our honor, but… looking at our keyboard layout and our spelling rules, I’m not sure how I could 😂

  • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

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

      • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Some desktop environments set a default compose key, but you might have to set one manually. Common choices are the menu key or the right alt key if you don’t use it much.

        Mostly it just defines a set of pretty standard and sensible combinations to add accents or other modifiers to existing characters, but there’s quite a bit you can do with it.

      • vort3@lemmy.ml
        0·
        12 days 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.

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    no, i think azerty takes the absolute cake, but the german layout is also dogshit. it’s qwertz for one, which is shit. and the placement of { [ ] } are absurd.

    and it’s not necessary that these languages have shit layouts. look at the polish programmer’s layout, that’s a sane way to add extra letters.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      12 days ago

      I just looked it up and wow it comes close to making sense but doesn’t quite manage to get there 😮

      You can feel that the people making it weren’t completely drunk, they realized that it would be a good idea to put ( ) together and [ ] as well… but no one cares about curly braces and symmetry looks nice I guess?

      µ is AltGr+M ? Wow someone actually thought things through! I guess it’ll be the same for € and @… Wait why is @ AltGr+Q and not AltGr+A?.. Did you guys base the layout off azerty at some point before realizing that was stupid and switching to qwerty, but you forgot to move @ along with A ? 😂

  • skami@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    12 days 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.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      12 days 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
      0·
      11 days 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.

  • Papamousse@beehaw.org
    0·
    12 days ago

    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

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      12 days ago

      Is that the one?

      You have « » and all the accents? 🤯

      You even have OE and AE? 😭

      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? 😮

      • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
        0·
        10 days ago

        That one is Canadiab Multilingual Standard. Canadian French is different. Both are in common use though.

      • RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz
        0·
        12 days ago

        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!

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          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!

          • Capsicones@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            0·
            11 days ago

            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.

      • Papamousse@beehaw.org
        0·
        12 days ago

        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 ?

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          12 days ago

          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, à and ç seems a waste of keys
          • I don’t like that ç is a separate key at the other side of the keyboard than c and 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, X and V being in the same place as in QWERTY… but not C 😑

          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 😂 )

          • Papamousse@beehaw.org
            0·
            11 days ago

            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 :)

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    0·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      12 days ago

      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 😛

    • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
      0·
      12 days ago

      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”.

  • guillem@aussie.zone
    0·
    12 days 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
      0·
      12 days 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

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        0·
        12 days 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
          0·
          12 days 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.lolEnglish
            0·
            12 days 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.

      • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
        0·
        12 days ago

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

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          On Slavic layouts, the right Alt key (AltGr) lets us type symbols like [, ], {, }, &, @, #, ×, ÷, €, đ since 0-9 is for diacritical letters by default and numbers with Shift. Still, Czech Windows users mostly use Alt codes, which is a point of friction when switching to Linux. But there, I’m happy with how I can customize the AltGr and the new AltGr+Shift layers with curly quotes, em dash, nbsp, hair space, arrows, middle dot, pi (π), pretty pi (𝛑), mu, Omega etc. My Compose key is RCtrl.

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          0·
          12 days 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
        0·
        12 days 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.

      • nope@jlai.lu
        0·
        10 days ago

        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

        • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          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

    • Malgas@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      12 days 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.

  • nemo@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    12 days ago

    AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).

    But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it’s faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me:

    • all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter
    • cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that’s exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean “ć”), same for ñ
    • English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key
  • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days 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.

  • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
    0·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • Gueoris@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 days ago

    As an azerty user, I don’t see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It’s super easy to do on linux, no?

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      11 days ago

      Having to use workarounds for your keyboad layout to be usable means that it’s a bad keyboard layout

      • Gueoris@lemmy.world
        0·
        11 days ago

        What workaround are you talking about ? I can easily type ÉÈÇÀÙ without any workaround 🤔

      • troglodyte_mignon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        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.

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      11 days 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 😂