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.mlOP
    10·
    24 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? 😮

    • RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz
      4·
      24 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!

      • Capsicones@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        23 days ago

        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.

      • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        1·
        24 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
          3·
          23 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.

    • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
      2·
      22 days ago

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

    • Papamousse@beehaw.org
      2·
      24 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
        2·
        24 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
          2·
          23 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 :)