
Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap? - Perados
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-35365604
======
yodsanklai
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 - e e = é" "option ` - a = à"... I don't know how to type "oeuf" or
"oeil" though.

~~~
gkya
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, hebrew and arabic, etc.

~~~
webkike
Cool, would you mind sharing your set up?

~~~
witty_username
XCompose would also work for this.

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espadrine
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 also get common non-keyboard characters (compose + C + o = ©,
compose + - + > = →, compose + = + e = €, guess how to do ₤ and ¥).

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

~~~
espadrine
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Software_support).

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jernfrost
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.

~~~
yodsanklai
> It is next to impossible to get an english layout Apple keyboard in Norway.

I'm surprised. Each time I ordered a laptop on the Apple Store, there was the
option to choose the keyboard layout.

> 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.

(Sorry to contradict you :)) But again, I found Mac OS to be very good at
guessing the language I'm using in a text input field. I could type French now
and it would be able to correct it! maybe it's not as polished for Norvergian.

The only think I miss is the ability to lookup the definition of a French or
Spanish word. By default, it only looks up english definitions when you click
on words (if somebody knows how to achieve this, i'm interested!).

> I think a lot of Europeans suffer over their keyboard layouts.

Actually, I'm pretty fine with the AZERTY keyboard, even for programming. What
I dislike is that I have to use both. My computer have qwerty keyboards, but
sometimes I have to use French keyboard on other people's computers...

~~~
DerekL
> The only think I miss is the ability to lookup the definition of a French or
> Spanish word. By default, it only looks up english definitions when you
> click on words (if somebody knows how to achieve this, i'm interested!).

Go to preferences in the Dictionary application.

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franzpeterfolz
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/](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.

~~~
efes
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!

~~~
lorenzhs
Hi, I've been using Neo2 for a couple of years now, so maybe I can help you
with these.

Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid
looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of
weeks.

You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5
and 6 _very very rarely_ , and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α
is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers
5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation
(layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe
picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and
your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with
QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)

It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total
point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most
helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total
immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you
have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about
learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.

I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint
navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.

Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead
keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è,
or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one
below it, and the one left of 1.

~~~
efes
Cool, thanks! I'll do a little practice and then jump in to immersion at the
start of my next vacation then. I just tried a little using an onscreen
keyboard as a cheat, and it doesn't really feel all that different from
learning chorded keyboard.

At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of
dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with
the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge
to far in a work environment.

------
jld89
Just make them get the spanish QWERTY. It has all possible accents (even for
german). The only exceptions for characters would be for words like "soeur",
or "oeil".

~~~
acz
Œœ is not part of the French keyboard layout either

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aikah
> 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.

~~~
Blaque
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.

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pboutros
Having grown up on that keyboard, I can say that I sincerely hope so. Adieu!

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sberder
And once again, the "standard to rule them all" dream * insert relevant xkcd
strip here * , finding a keyboard layout that would allow easy typing in
French and all France's languages (Breton, Basque, etc) and dialects (Catalan,
Provençal, etc). Impossible task to bring both easy typing and support for all
of those.

It seems to me that it's a problem (or bunch of problems) that already has a
solution(s). I'm right now using a QWERTY layout under Linux. I can code and
type English directly, use the compose key to type in French, German and
Breton and use a keyboard input (currently fcitx) to type in Chinese. Add to
this the fact that you can easily input complex signs that you wouldn't find
on keyboards like µ or €. And all this is actually pretty easy to use. I'm
sure there are equivalents in Microsoft and MacOS. Why look further?

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rasz_pl
>Most people think that ignoring an accent on a capital letter is acceptable

Of course it is! In Poland its perfectly reasonable to ignore all "weird"
polish characters. Ą ą Ć ć Ę ę Ł ł Ń ń Ó ó Ś ś Ź ź Ż ż? hell no. I started
using computers in ~90, never ever in my life configured local keyboard
variant.

>commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of
recommendations by the summer

brilliant, nothing like one more standard to ignore!

offtopic: BBC Video volume slider goes to 11 (haha), but is too quiet even at
full volume :(. BBC should have people/systems responsible for this type of
stuff, its not rocket science to normalize volume :/. You can always lower
volume on the client if its too loud, but there are no easy ways of making
very quiet stuff louder (other than passing it thru sound editor).

------
fab13n
I hope the replacement will be programmer-friendly. I still remap my French
keyboards in QWERTY because I never got accustomed to hunt for programming
characters on AZERTY keyboards.

I don't know how useful it would be to get programmers and IT pros on-board,
in order to help adoption.

~~~
mikelward
The article mentions Bepo as an alternative.

[http://ccm.net/faq/32759-bepo-a-keyboard-layout-optimized-
fo...](http://ccm.net/faq/32759-bepo-a-keyboard-layout-optimized-for-the-
french-language) says it is optimized for "typing French and programming
languages".

Looking at the layout, it seems all programming punctuation is accessible via
either Shift or AltGr, so only one modifier.
[http://static.commentcamarche.net/www.commentcamarche.net/pi...](http://static.commentcamarche.net/www.commentcamarche.net/pictures/C0JF2SqY-
carte-bepo-complete.png)

------
gizi
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 need to switch on the third level, assign
it to a dead key (such as ALT) and then you can compose it as alt+C. The
"third level" does not work out-of-the-box.

~~~
acz
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.

------
Aetherix
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.

~~~
acz
But you can go to Netherlands to buy one.

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

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kyriakos
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.

~~~
rockdoe
QWERTZ is a German layout. Try Dutch stores.

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

~~~
rockdoe
And I'm explaining you why that is difficult and what the alternative is.

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cryptos
QWERTY is maybe more efficient (for english), but it is not as efficient as it
could be. Unfortunately more efficient keyboard layouts are hard to establish.

~~~
nwah1
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 native colemak keyboards.

Changing your caps lock key to a backspace provides most of the finger travel
benefits of colemak with much less annoyance.

~~~
nazgob
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 ;)

~~~
nwah1
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.

~~~
nazgob
Perhaps I was not clean enough. When I use sb else computer for a longer time
I bring my hardware Colemack keyboard with me. If its just a minute or two, I
use my now lame touch typing qwerty skills, I'm much slower then Colemack but
still faster then most of 'normal' people.

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jrcii
The article refers to quotation marks as "inverted commas", I've never heard
that before.

~~~
JadeNB
I think that is the usual English (as opposed to American) terminology. See,
for example,
[http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/36944#eid8715028](http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/36944#eid8715028)
.

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nerdcity
Blank Keycaps is the way.

