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?
As an azerty user, I don't see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It's super easy to do on linux, no?
Having to use workarounds for your keyboad layout to be usable means that it's a bad keyboard layout
There are several Azerty layouts. Some don’t allow you to type uppercase accented letters easily, some do. I’ve switched to Linux about fifteen years ago and never had an issue typing these characters with the default layout. It used to be more complicated on Windows, I don’t know if that’s still the case. I should give it a try the next time I get the occasion to type on a Windows computer.
I currently use the fr-oss Azerty layout, which is probably not perfect but has many advantages. I love being able to type thin spaces and non breaking spaces easily. The diagram doesn’t explain it, but combining the é/2 key with the Capslock key will give you an É — whereas combining it with the Maj key will give you a 2. That’s the mechanism Gueoris is alluding to here.
I still don’t get why it’s easier to type a semi-colon than a full stop, though. I love semi-colons, but even I don’t use them that much.
OMG they made Caps Lock actually useful? 😮
What workaround are you talking about ? I can easily type ÉÈÇÀÙ without any workaround 🤔
How do you type them then?
Capslock + the letter, thats all