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Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

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Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#11
post #6

> The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer. Yeah, as usual some minister gave money to business owned by a friend or family member for useless study. A french classic. And of course, impossible to know how much this study cost the tax payers ... I don't believe this kind of matter should be a priority of the culture ministry.

[deleted]

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#12
To those that understand it to mean that AZERTY is dying, it is not. In fact, it is very hard to buy a non-AZERTY laptop in France. It is unlikely to ever go away.

I personally would prefer (and do use) a QWERTY with compose key shortcuts. It is obviously easier to write code, but I find writing French also easier that way. Not only do we get the obvious (compose + ' = é, compose + ^ = ê, compose + ` = è), but we also get common non-keyboard characters (compose + C + o = ©, compose + - + > = →, compose + = + e = €, guess how to do ₤ and ¥).

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#13

Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this. "option…

The US-International layout exists for ages, and allows for composable letters. "áéíóúçãñàâô..." is as simple as getting the accent + letter.

I fail to understand why the Brazilian Standardization bodies decided that we needed to get a keyboard with an exclusive letter for "ç" and yet forces composition of everything else.

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#15
post #8
post #3

QWERTY is maybe more efficient (for english), but it is not as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately more efficient keyboard layouts are hard to establish.

It isn't so hard to establish. Colemak and its variants are clearly among the most efficient out there, and there are plenty of metrics one can use to judge, such as finger travel distance, alternating distribution of right and left hand use, and concentration of the most commonly used characters on the home row. The problem is mainly that it isn't default, which can make it annoying unless you don't mind buying nati…

While its not default you can get it very easily on Linux and its ready on OSX, just need to pick it. No idea about Windows. For pair programming I use keyboard with hardware Colemak, my pp partner can use whatever that way ;)

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#18

Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this. "option…

The compose key on linux also works really well:

Compose e' = é Compose oe = œ Compose a^ = â Compose e" = ë

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#19

Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this. "option…

I use emacs for input. My browser is xombrero, and with ctrl + i, I can switch to emacs for editing current input. There, I've created an input method with postfix maps, which allows me to input most european languages plus turkish. If I wanted to type « liberté, égalité, fraternité », I'd type:

  liberte/, e/galite/, fraternite/
Very easy, and invaluably useful. And I can switch to other input methods like greek, hebrew and arabic, etc.

Re: Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

#20

Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this. "option…

I'm not against Azerty but we still can't type « or » with it and since it's part of the language, it definitely should be there.
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