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 aiguso 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
éandç! - 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
αandβ? - Ermm… okay… which one?
αorβ? - Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let’s just pick one at random!
µit 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?
In defence of the µ, I actually use it more than the other two, for micro- units.
The ¤ is the symbol for any currency but I have never seen it used in the wild.
I’ve seen ¤ used as a currency mark in games. Dwarf Fortress is the one that comes to mind, but I feel like I’ve seen it elsewhere as well.
Oooh I hadn’t thought about the micro units thingy and I had no idea about
¤, you do learn stuff everyday 😮I still think
ÉorÇor«or»would be more useful thoughWhen you have the Uppercase key switched on, pressing é will result in É. I’m quite sure it also works for ç and whatever
Really? With caps lock I used to get get numbers instead of é è ç. I think… it’s been a while since I’ve been forced to use azerty
Depends on the keyboard mapping (there are multiple azertys)
The real shame is that windows never had the compose key. But all these layouts come from mechanical typewriters, anyway.
It is with great reluctance that I say anything nice about Windows, but I did like the ability to type any character from its ALT+number code. Much less convenient than having a good keyboard layout or a compose key, but it’s a pretty cool feature.
On Slavic layouts, the right Alt key (AltGr) lets us type symbols like
[,],{,},&,@,#,×,÷,€,đsince 0-9 is for diacritical letters by default and numbers with Shift. Still, Czech Windows users mostly use Alt codes, which is a point of friction when switching to Linux. But there, I’m happy with how I can customize the AltGr and the new AltGr+Shift layers with curly quotes, em dash, nbsp, hair space, arrows, middle dot, pi (π), pretty pi (𝛑), mu, Omega etc. My Compose key is RCtrl.On a German QWERTZ keyboard too, μ is the only Greek letter you can easily type (altgr+m) and I’m pretty sure this is because of micro units.
EURKEY layout is great for that. It’s basically qwerty, but all the european letters and diatrics are places meaningfully. For example ä is right ALT + a
So it’s a system like qwerty-fr ?
Grave accent ` Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). Acute accent ´ Press AltGr + key left the corresponding letter (works for the letter e). Circumflex ^ Press AltGr + key above the corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). Diaeresis ¨ Press AltGr + key below the corresponding letter (works for letters e, y, u, i, o and a). Cedilla ¸ Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for the letter c). Ligature œ/æ Press AltGr + key right the corresponding letter (works for letters o and a).Sounds like it but there is probably some differences.
I use EURKEY cause I prefer standard qwerty for programming but I frequently need all kind of european symbols due to working internationally and in multiple languages across europe.