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?
I grew up en français, albeit in Canada. In our informatique classes, we had CSA standard layout keyboards (IBM, not Microsoft).
It's essentially a QWERTY keyboard with built-in compose key modifier and silkscreened characters on the board for accented characters (capitals included). Not too bad to learn on, and considering that QWERTY would be so prevalent in my life, I think it's a good compromise.
When I was in uni in the 90s and finally ran across an AZERTY keyboard, I literally couldn't use it. Not only is layout different, but the character mod sequence makes no ergonomic sense to me.
~~NB: fun fact, y a pas de mots qui commencent en C cédille. C'est pas pour dire qu'on a pas besoin de majuscules cédillées. :)~~
NBB: ¤ is an end-of-cell marker, introduced at the advent of word processors to distinguish newline and carriage returns from the ends of cells in tables. Not sure if it had a meaning before then, but my memory is saying it had something to do with sub-paragraphs.
That's interesting, I'm glad to know people who didn't grow up with azerty also find it awful! Someone else also mentionned CSA, it looks based... all those specials characters 🤩
And just to be nitpicky : Ça sera bientôt les vacances! There, first letter cedilla 😛
En effet. Bravo!
I know that last one as the "sun" character (circle with rays coming out) but really I once learned it's a placeholder character for "your local currency sign".
How to spot a canadian that just started using a computer: they end questions with É