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?
no, the one you put is the "official" french canadian one, used mostly by gov, but everyday people are using the "normal" one
This is why we have not conquered the world yet :)
Do you not use BEPO ?
Ah that explains it! The other one must terrify people by its sheer overkill awesomeness!
A lot of people I know do use BEPO, but I'm not a fan :
è,ê,àandçseems a waste of keysçis a separate key at the other side of the keyboard thancand not just AltGr+CThere's also Ergo-L which I find a lot more sensible : https://ergol.org/ But again I have nitpicks like
Z,XandVbeing in the same place as in QWERTY... but notC😑I gave up on finding a perfect layout so I thought I might as well just use colemak as a base and edit the layout files to add the special characters I need.
I should have called this thread TEARDOWN OF EVERY KEYBOARD LAYOUT!!!! (except the Canadian ones 😂 )
I'd be completely lost with BEPO...
I used QWERTY US in 80-90, it was the only available keyboard on 8bit machine (Sinclair, Amstrad, Commodore, etc), then AZERTY in 90-00 because I had a PC, then moved to Québec so since ~2000 use QWERTY FR_CA. Because of all the switch and never learning how to type, I still type with like 2 fingers :)