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 aigu so 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 é and ç !
  • 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 α and β?
  • Ermm… okay… which one? α or β?
  • Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let’s just pick one at random!
  • µ it 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?

    • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Some desktop environments set a default compose key, but you might have to set one manually. Common choices are the menu key or the right alt key if you don’t use it much.

      Mostly it just defines a set of pretty standard and sensible combinations to add accents or other modifiers to existing characters, but there’s quite a bit you can do with it.

    • vort3@lemmy.ml
      5·
      3 days ago

      Yes. You choose the compose key in your DE settings (usually right alt key), then you can press it and type compose sequences to insert unusual symbols or strings.