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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?

#31

Post by gpvos »

rglullis wrote: post #13
yodsanklai wrote: post #9

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.

This causes excruciating pain when coding, as you can't type a single ', ", or ~ without an obligatory space after it.

Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.

The Mac keyboard is also bearable.

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

#32

Post by trgn »

yodsanklai wrote: post #9

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…

good riddance indeed!

what sucks about AZERTY too is that very common strokes require modifiers

- the `.` (point) requires a shift key! - for `@` you need "alt gr" - top-row numbers need a shift. especially annoying if the keyboard does not have a number pad

ugh..

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

#34

Post by Blaque »

aikah wrote: 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.

AFNOR is France's International Organization for Standardization (ISO) member body. They're also a non-profit. There is some cronyism in France but I'm not so sure it's the case here.

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

#35

Post by rglullis »

gpvos wrote: post #31
rglullis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This causes excruciating pain when coding, as you can't type a single ', ", or ~ without an obligatory space after it. Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard. The Mac keyboard is also bearable.

"excruciating pain" is a bit of hyperbole, don't you think?

Quote keys are still in the home row, it is just a matter of muscle memory to get used to "right pinky at home row, thumb at space bar" to get quotes going.

But I am an emacs user, so maybe I just got used to the composability.

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

#37

Post by hk__2 »

espadrine wrote: post #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 als…

Wouldn’t that be hard to write French given that there are é/è/à everywhere?

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

#38

Post by gpvos »

kyriakos wrote: 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.

Here's a map of where to order your keyboard: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latin_keyboard_layou... . Also, QWERTY is dominant in Poland nowadays; other options are the Baltics, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain.

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

#39

Post by hadrien01 »

franzpeterfolz wrote: post #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 nor…

This is a DVORAK-like layout. We have the same for French-speaking countries, namely the BÉPO.

I tried switching to it, but I couldn't after a few weeks for three reasons:

- I type slower on other's people keyboards when I have to change frequently of layout (I use a Spanish QWERTY layout so it isn't as different);

- My phone doesn't have the layout, so more switching;

- The shortcuts aren't as convenient (Ctrl+c/v/t/etc.).

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

#40

Post by harperlee »

yodsanklai wrote: post #9

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…

In spanish we also have lots of accents, plus the ñ, and the ç if you write catalan - plus, we open questions and exclamations with ¿ and ¡. I have a generic american layout in my laptop and it's not a problem at all.

Regarding the œ, shouldn't that be a ligature, handled by the font system? Although it should be language-dependant....

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