this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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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?

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[–] nemo@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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
[–] skami@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.ml 4 points 1 week 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")

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.ml 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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 😂 )

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

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.ml 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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 😛

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Ça sera bientôt les vacances!

En effet. Bravo!

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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".

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

How to spot a canadian that just started using a comouter: they end questions with É

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what the Compose key is. Is it an additional modifier you need to define?

[–] vort3@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week 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.

[–] Canadian_Cabinet@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn't insane

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

I hate AZERTY so much it hurts my brains

[–] Jack@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Aren't the A and Q keys also at terrible positions?

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