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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?

#71

Post by thawkins »

jernfrost wrote: post #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.…

Absolutly agree, i spent months and months working on a contract in italy, writting c/c++ on keyboards without { or } . The only way to get it on the italian layout seemed to be to use A-123 and A-125, it drove me nuts. Eventualy i had to bring my own keyboard from the UK. because the bits of paper glued to the keys kept falling off.

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

#73

Post by acz »

gizi wrote: post #69

I've dropped AZERTY more than 10 years ago. Nowadays I use QWERTY with "US, international with dead keys" as keyboard layout. It works much better than AZERTY. You don't need to remember where all the accented letters are on the keyboard. You just compose them logically with the `'", characters. It pretty much allows for composing any French (accent) German (umlaut) diacritical. The only difficulty is typing a ç. You…

In the default US International Çç is AltGr + ,

Also if you are on Windows you can use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) which is a free tool to develop keyboard layouts.

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

#74

Post by kyriakos »

rockdoe wrote: post #25
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.

QWERTZ is a German layout. Try Dutch stores.

On the contrary I'm looking for QUERTY from German stores.

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

#75

Post by acz »

Aetherix wrote: post #47

In Belgium, even in the Dutch speaking part of the country AZERTY is used. It's not that common to find QWERTY keyboards in stores. Since I'm a software developer I've switched to US layout some years ago and never looked back.

But you can go to Netherlands to buy one.

Luckily the company I work for provides QWERTY and AZERTY laptops to its employees.

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

#77

Post by touristtam »

wodenokoto wrote: post #68
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…

Which one is the compose key? Sitting on mac with American English QWERTY?

Ha, I am not the only one to wonder! :)

I have opted for a US layout a few years ago, regardless of the OS. And I cannot myself going back to a UK/FR layout. Thanks god I don't speak any other language. :p

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

#78

Post by nwah1 »

nazgob wrote: post #15
nwah1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Yes, but now what happens when you need to use someone else's computer? It just makes life a little bit more annoying. De facto standards tend to be very important, so much so that the optimality of that standard is less important than the existence of a standard.

I happen to use colemak, but I recognize it was not a rational decision.

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

#79

Post by FullyFunctional »

harperlee wrote: post #40
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....

Careful. Wars have been fought over this. The letter 'æ' in danish is a proper letter of the alphabet (in the 27th position) whereas the same symbol in French represents 'a' and 'e' joined together. Much fun.

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

#80

Post by espadrine »

wodenokoto wrote: post #68
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…

Which one is the compose key? Sitting on mac with American English QWERTY?

The compose key is a concept, not a physical key :)

If your operating system supports it, you can bind any key to the compose key, such as the right alt key.

Here's a link to several options to get software support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Software_support.

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