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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?

#21

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.

That's the advantage of the compose key: compose + < + < = « (and the opposite for »).

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

#22

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…

OS X 10.11 brought the iOS-inspired letter selection, which makes discoverability a bit better, I guess. but as someone who never needs to type those I can't tell if its efficient or not. to type æ you do a long press on a, and either mouse over or push the number beneath the letter. That seems 100x more complicated than typing a normal key, but at least there is no guessing.

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

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the advantage of the compose key: compose + < + < = « (and the opposite for »).

Oh yeah sure, it's a solution for the current keyboard but I believe a key should already exist for it since it's a common symbol in the language. It would be the equivalent of having to do altgr+S for the dollar symbol in the US.

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

#24
Not french, but german.

I just recently switched to the neo2 keyboard layout.

The hardest thing is unlearning quertz (almost like querty)

http://www.neo-layout.org/

It is highly optimized for the home row on the german vocabulary. Support for Programming is also very good.

It has 6 different layers • Lowercase • Uppercase • Special Characters (Braces etc.) • Navigation and Numbers • Greek Alphabet (same layout as normal Characters, ιαεοσ) • Mathematical signs Σℕℝ∂

But I rarely use layer 5 and 6.

I think layer 3,4 and 6 could be a good fit for every keyboard layout.

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

#26

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…

option - q will get you œ, but at least in informal settings, typing "oe" is acceptable, I think.

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

#27

Not french, but german. I just recently switched to the neo2 keyboard layout. The hardest thing is unlearning quertz (almost like querty) http://www.neo-layout.org/ It is highly optimized for the home row on the german vocabulary. Support for Programming is also very good. It has 6 different layers • Lowercase • Uppercase • Special Characters (Braces etc.) • Navigation and Numbers • Greek Alphabet (same layout as nor…

I live in Zurich and have been thinking of switching.. If you don't mind, I have a couple questions:

How did you handle learning it given so many layers? Stickers seem like trouble..

Do you find it better or worse for dealing with use of occasional accents/etc from a 3rd latin language, (i.e. French) than a more traditional compose key route?

Thanks!

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

#28
post #25
post #7

Too bad most laptops I can find online in Europe are QWERTZ. The only store I found that delivers abroad and has some decent notebooks is amazon.co.uk but I'd prefer something in euro.

QWERTZ is a German layout. Try Dutch stores.

Czech Republic and Slovakia use QWERTZ as well. However, most keyboards are double-labeled, so it isn't much of a problem in my opinion.

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

#29
post #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, hebr…

Cool, would you mind sharing your set up?

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

#30
I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts. I am Norwegian and a software developer. I hate Norwegian keyboard layout. It makes programming so much more awkward because the {}, [] and ; symbols used a lot in programming are not easily accessible.

There is also a kind of tyranny in how computer companies deal with language. It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway. Also Apple, and I pretty sure MS does the same treat language as a totally binary thing. Like either you write only english or only german, norwegian, french or whatever.

For the non english speakers among us, especially those from small countries like Norway we mix in a lot of english in our writing. But spell checking software isn't really designed to handle that.

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