It looks similar to QWERTY, but some letters are swapped around[1], and some extra characters are added so that we can type in French easily — well at least that was the intent.
The big problem with this layout is that we can't type proper French with it. A lot of characters are missing, for example you can type « é » but not « É » which is its uppercase counterpart. Same goes with « ç », you need to remember to type the unicode key code with Alt+128 to type « Ç » otherwise you need to cross fingers that the autocorrect will catch it. Oh and those French quotation marks that I'm using? They are not available on AZERTY either! Even though they are the ones that should be used in French.
Another problem is that I'm a programmer and QWERTY is colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak. Every piece of software in the world and every shortcut is meant for the QWERTY layout. Using another layout is the source of a lot of pain because intuitive shortcuts become awkward, or simply don't work at all and a lot of remapping is required.
In a nutshell, AZERTY is the worst of both worlds — the people who designed it just wanted to see the world burn apparently.
Due to this frustration I've been working on a keyboard layout that does exactly the opposite: bring the best of both worlds. This layout is called qwerty-fr.
It can look a bit overwhelming at first, but it's actually really simple. It is a strict superset of QWERTY, which means that anyone who knows QWERTY can type on this layout without even knowing that it's not a real QWERTY layout. Additionally, all the accentuated characters can be typed directly by combining the right Alt and another key, contrary to what it looks this is actually very convenient and doesn't slow down French typing speed noticeably.
Ιt goes further, I've added special dead keys that make it super easy to type greek and currencies (math is coming soon). Just do AltGr + g (g for “greek”) and the layout becomes:
You can then just press the letter “y” for “¥”. Easy peasy.
Next step is adding a math dead key[4], but that's for another release.
[1] Nobody knows why the A and Q were swapped, neither why the Z and W were swapped. Also why on earth is there an entire key exclusively dedicated to « ² »?!
[2] € is on AltGr + 5, which makes it easy to remember.
[3] This rendering of the currency layout is actually outdated, I've switched the positions of the currencies to make them easier to remember. For example, “p” now yields “£”. You can see the current mapping here: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/blob/aa44310587f574cb...
A fun side effect of the AZERTY layout is that, before widespread smartphones, you used to be able to tell when the French left the country to go on vacation because there would be a spike in Google searches for "frqnce":
I've seen countless attempts to use Google Trends to support some theory, but I don't think I've ever seen it so clear as what you linked! This is really neat. Both the seasonal spikes and the flattening that happens once smartphones became widespread.
Given how everybody has a different answer (use the Canadian/Spanish/Swiss keyboard, use the Compose key, go for Colemak/Dvorak...) that seems to overlook how, like it or not, the US Qwerty keyboard is the standard for programmers, I think you're on to something!
Good luck to you!
One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different standards, for some reason. Besides the keyboard, I've also noticed they have a lot of WIFI channel exclusions.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, but do you think this might impede the success of your project?
The fact that most people ask “Why shouldn't I use alternative <x> instead?” means that I need to improve my README file to show better why QWERTY-fr is truly different from all the other keyboard layouts, and what makes it stick out!
Colloquially, I already planned to update the website[1] with a tutorial guiding the user step by step through the philosophy. Hopefully this will help users understand its value proposition!
With regards to the different standards, I agree that French people tend to reinvent the wheel. I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they never look well at the previous attempts, which leads to crappy alternative standards. This project aims to reinvent the wheel but in a good way!
I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a standardization organization once it's stable. It should help adoption because I could then convince OS maintainers to add it as an available layout. :)
> I agree that French people tend to reinvent the wheel.
If their wheel is better, why not?
> I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they never look well at the previous attempts, which leads to crappy alternative standards. This project aims to reinvent the wheel but in a good way!
Great answer, I totally agree!!
I wish you a lot of luck, as I'm a bit irked to have to provide support for weird keyboards! (I hope someone from Germany will do as you did so QWERTZ can also die :-)
> I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a standardization organization once it's stable.
Even better! Using standards is a great way to work around many issues.
One last thing: if I may suggest, you should replace the default picture by one with fewer characters: the german β, the spanish Ñ, and the scandinavian character (oslash, ae) may be nice to have, but they may play against you: French users may see them as irrelevant, and cluttering the keyboard.
Trim everything you can, to only have as little extra characters as necessary to support french.
For similar reasons, you may want to unify the blue and the red overlays. I've figured out that the right Alt did toggle the blue overlay, but I still don't understand how to get the red one.
Given that blue and red do not coexist on any key, merging the red keys into the blue overlay may be for the better: you want what you offer to be extremely clear and simple to understand
> With regards to the different standards, I agree that French people tend to reinvent the wheel. I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they never look well at the previous attempts
Well not everything as to be from America and in English language. Different attempts are made in different countries and it's true that US attempts tend to stick, not necessarily because they are superior, but because of the general US influence.
It's true that AZERTY is an annoying layout but only because everything is made as if the only existing layout was QWERTY.
>> the French seem to enjoy using different standards
> How dare they use the metric system and degree Celsius?
Judgements about what they dare to do aside, isn't it fair to call those French? The metric system is based on the meter, a French unit. The International Prototype Kilogram (obsoleted only recently) was stored in France. While Celsius wasn't invented in France, a Frenchman flipped the scale (originally, freezing was 100 and boiling was 0). etc.
Not Invented Here syndrome doesn't mean that what you do invent here can't be good, that you can't sometimes get the rest of the world to agree with you, or that you abandon anything that's successful.
> Given how everybody has a different answer (use the Canadian/Spanish/Swiss keyboard, use the Compose key, go for Colemak/Dvorak...)
I'd advise the author to go one step further and adopt the ANSI layout instead of ISO. So you can just get the US version with most of the keys already etched with the correct symbol, no matter where you are in the world.
> One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different standards, for some reason.
Not French, but here's an observation: the French world has great engineering schools like the Polytechniques (Paris, Montreal, Lausanne) or Mines. And the French government historically had military procurement and R&D done inside the country as well. They are, for instance, the only country outside of the United States to have built and operate a nuclear aircraft carrier.
> I'd advise the author to go one step further and adopt the ANSI layout instead of ISO. So you can just get the US version with most of the keys already etched with the correct symbol, no matter where you are in the world.
Totally. I once had to use a UK keyboard with this weird vertical ISO enter key - it's a pain.
I think I might live with a smaller space bar, as I got a rare IBM SK-8835 keyboard in JP locale before I could source a US one ( see: http://www.komotch2.com/junk/kj/sk8835lj.htm ): the true dealbreaker was the ISO enter key.
The carveout from the spacebar were actually pretty handy, to map with AutoHotKey extra keys staying right by my thumbs :)
> They are, for instance, the only country outside of the United States to have built and operate a nuclear aircraft carrier.
I love that a lot of countries do a lot of things: we need more alternatives to avoid duopolies (MIPS to avoid AMD64 vs ARM64, Firefox OS to avoid Android vs iOS)
And it's even better when the 3rd alternative offers unique advantages!
But using a different keyboard layout for no reason at all... sorry, I don't get that. It makes life harder for everyone, with 0 practical benefit.
It's like if some country mandated a square USB-C connector: breaking a standard, just for the pleasure of breaking it, to make things more expansive, create more e-waste, etc.
I don’t think you’re right about the US layout being standard for programmers. It might be in some countries, but I’ve meet maybe two Danish prograamers that uses US layout.
The weird part about this layout is that you can use it for English, French, German and Swedish (maybe more), but leave out exactly one Danish characther making it useless for Danish. Why leave even add æ and ø if you leave out å?
No idea about ø but æ is used (very rarely, to be fair) in French. Famously, it's used in the name Lætitia. We enjoy having characters that are important but comparatively rare, such as ù, which has a key of its own in the French keyboard even though it is used in a single word, "où" (meaning where), to differentiate it from "ou" (meaning or). I've always felt the key might as well say "où" on it :-)
Hm. I switched to US QWERTY twice. Both times my wrist started hurting after half a year. The special characters feel badly spread out.
Never had any issues with Belgian AZERTY. Much prefer the useless number row to be behind the shift (there's a numpad for those anyway), and having special characters readily available on that row.
> One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different standards, for some reason. Besides the keyboard, I've also noticed they have a lot of WIFI channel exclusions.
Each country has its own standards, especially with radio channels, but France seems pretty similar with other west-european countries (Wifi channels, FM radio, digital TV...).
Regarding physical keyboard layouts, mostly all the world is using the ISO layout but US are stuck with the ANSI keyboard missing one key.
It's preinstalled on Linux, and available for macOS and Windows as well. I feel a keyboard based on the US layout which far too often is considered a standard (better for coding and buggy software and games), with dead keys and diacritics is a fantastic idea.
I have migrated all my machines to use it instead of the custom layouts or the US one that's very restrictive when you need to write accents.
Not much 'euro', eastern europe is missing as a whole.
E.g. polish Ł, czech ř, slovak ô, ...
Either use dead keys for all diacritics or somehow add them all to the third and forth layer.
I don't get it. Is Portugal alone in having separate keys for accents? I have a key for ^ and a key for "o". If I type ^ and then o, I get ô. If I want to type a literal ^ i press ^ twice. Same for `,´,~,¨ (which is not ideal for programming, but I'm used to it). I'm missing the inverted ^ because it doesn't exist in Portuguese but you get the point. The only letter than has a dedicated key is ç.
Wouldn't this solve much of the problems of these keyboard layouts by reusing the same letters?
It does in fact include the polish Ł, czech ř, slovak ô, check the Layout page and the shift and Altgr tabs, they are made using the diacritic dead keys
I wanted to post the same. I am German and I am using it for my daily tasks. It combines the easy to program US layout with easy access to German Umlauts Ä, Ö, Ü, ß.
Highly recommended. No idea though for any other languages other than German.
I'm Italian, I've tried multiple layouts and keyboards, at the end I've settled on the US one which is better for programming (positioning of the brackets are better) and on MacOS I can just long press to get the accentuated letters.
On Windows I use the US INTL layout and it works really well even for accentuated characters.
Just by typing ` followed by the letter that you want accentuated, for example `e = è, even my non coder friends prefer that layout over the official Italian one.
But your keyboard it's actually pretty good in my opinion, you can write in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and probably a few more languages that I can't recognize, so I would propose to change the name to qwerty-weu (West Europe) since that seems the spirit of the project.
This is actually a pretty good idea. I speak 2 languages besides English so this covers one of them completely. Sure, it doesn't cover Cyrillic, which is the second most frequently used but even so, this would completely eliminate the necessity to switch between English and Spanish whenever needed. Cyrillic annoyingly can't be solved easily but I guess it's still a good deal. I'm willing to re-map my keyboard and give it a shot and see if that would make sense as a daily driver.
Interesting. Years ago, I made a very similar custom Dvorak layout for French accents. The main benefit was that all vowels are located on the left side of the middle row.
With that said, I don’t think I’ve typed a French accent on a physical keyboard in almost a decade. For the most part (99%), I’ve stopped reading and writing in French. On the rare occasions I need to write French formally, I usually copy and paste the accents missed by the spell checker.
I miss using Linux as my daily driver because its compose key support was unsurpassed. Easy to set up and to add sequences if the mood strikes you. Beyond simple accent marks, it could handle arrows, basic smileys, and even the Greek letter pi.
Meanwhile on macOS Big Sur, Karabiner seems to no longer work correctly (and was a royal pain to set up besides), the US International layout doesn't include a proper compose key (it just turns all punctuation keys into dead keys), and the dead keys don't even make all basic combinations (e.g. Polish "ć" or Esperanto "ĉ").
Seriously, Apple had to go out of their way to screw this up! Just tack the Unicode modifier character (e.g. U+0301) onto the end and run Unicode normalization! I get that you don't want this when you have dead keys doubling as normal keys, but dedicated dead keys (e.g. Alt+E) should just always create the character you're asking of them.
Just let me set one of my modifier keys to a proper extensible compose key!!
Same here. I'm Dutch, but write English (obviously) and occasionally German and a little Frisian (for place and street names on OpenStreetMap). Once you get used to the compose key all keyboards sold with the basic US layout suddenly just work fine, which incidentally — as a programmer — suits me just fine.
Any new layout is basically dead on arrival except for a few keyboard geeks. Commercial viability (as in, keyboards sold with that layout and correct keycaps) is essentially zero unless a government mandates its use. The latter is not likely in countries like France.
Making the compose-key (usually assigned to the right alt) more popular and better supported is probably the most effective way of enabling the input of letters like É, —, œ, Å, ç, ß, and € on desktop operating systems.
I am french speaking person and a programmer. I switched a year ago to qwerty and wish I had done so decades ago because the shortcuts in programs are conceived for qwert keyboards. I use karabiner and goku under macOS to produce accented characters. It is sufficiently fast to be usable.
Readit News
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/KB_Franc... (AZERTY layout screenshot)
It looks similar to QWERTY, but some letters are swapped around[1], and some extra characters are added so that we can type in French easily — well at least that was the intent.
The big problem with this layout is that we can't type proper French with it. A lot of characters are missing, for example you can type « é » but not « É » which is its uppercase counterpart. Same goes with « ç », you need to remember to type the unicode key code with Alt+128 to type « Ç » otherwise you need to cross fingers that the autocorrect will catch it. Oh and those French quotation marks that I'm using? They are not available on AZERTY either! Even though they are the ones that should be used in French.
Another problem is that I'm a programmer and QWERTY is colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak. Every piece of software in the world and every shortcut is meant for the QWERTY layout. Using another layout is the source of a lot of pain because intuitive shortcuts become awkward, or simply don't work at all and a lot of remapping is required.
In a nutshell, AZERTY is the worst of both worlds — the people who designed it just wanted to see the world burn apparently.
Due to this frustration I've been working on a keyboard layout that does exactly the opposite: bring the best of both worlds. This layout is called qwerty-fr.
https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/raw/master/qwerty-fr-... (QWERTY-fr layout screenshot)
It can look a bit overwhelming at first, but it's actually really simple. It is a strict superset of QWERTY, which means that anyone who knows QWERTY can type on this layout without even knowing that it's not a real QWERTY layout. Additionally, all the accentuated characters can be typed directly by combining the right Alt and another key, contrary to what it looks this is actually very convenient and doesn't slow down French typing speed noticeably.
Ιt goes further, I've added special dead keys that make it super easy to type greek and currencies (math is coming soon). Just do AltGr + g (g for “greek”) and the layout becomes:
https://i.imgur.com/pCHipNH.png (Greek layout screenshot)
You can then press any letter to type the corresponding greek character — for example “p” for “π”.
For currencies, press AltGr + Shift + 5, and the layout becomes[3]:
https://i.imgur.com/XH6gp6c.png (Currency layout screenshot)
You can then just press the letter “y” for “¥”. Easy peasy.
Next step is adding a math dead key[4], but that's for another release.
[1] Nobody knows why the A and Q were swapped, neither why the Z and W were swapped. Also why on earth is there an entire key exclusively dedicated to « ² »?!
[2] € is on AltGr + 5, which makes it easy to remember.
[3] This rendering of the currency layout is actually outdated, I've switched the positions of the currencies to make them easier to remember. For example, “p” now yields “£”. You can see the current mapping here: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/blob/aa44310587f574cb...
[4] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/issues/11
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=frqnce
This search has become less common as people take their smartphones and, hence, their own keyboards, with them.
Good luck to you!
One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different standards, for some reason. Besides the keyboard, I've also noticed they have a lot of WIFI channel exclusions.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, but do you think this might impede the success of your project?
The fact that most people ask “Why shouldn't I use alternative <x> instead?” means that I need to improve my README file to show better why QWERTY-fr is truly different from all the other keyboard layouts, and what makes it stick out!
Colloquially, I already planned to update the website[1] with a tutorial guiding the user step by step through the philosophy. Hopefully this will help users understand its value proposition!
[1] https://qwerty-fr.org
—
With regards to the different standards, I agree that French people tend to reinvent the wheel. I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they never look well at the previous attempts, which leads to crappy alternative standards. This project aims to reinvent the wheel but in a good way!
I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a standardization organization once it's stable. It should help adoption because I could then convince OS maintainers to add it as an available layout. :)
If their wheel is better, why not?
> I have nothing against that but the big issue is that they never look well at the previous attempts, which leads to crappy alternative standards. This project aims to reinvent the wheel but in a good way!
Great answer, I totally agree!!
I wish you a lot of luck, as I'm a bit irked to have to provide support for weird keyboards! (I hope someone from Germany will do as you did so QWERTZ can also die :-)
> I plan to get this keyboard layout standardized by a standardization organization once it's stable.
Even better! Using standards is a great way to work around many issues.
One last thing: if I may suggest, you should replace the default picture by one with fewer characters: the german β, the spanish Ñ, and the scandinavian character (oslash, ae) may be nice to have, but they may play against you: French users may see them as irrelevant, and cluttering the keyboard.
Trim everything you can, to only have as little extra characters as necessary to support french.
For similar reasons, you may want to unify the blue and the red overlays. I've figured out that the right Alt did toggle the blue overlay, but I still don't understand how to get the red one.
Given that blue and red do not coexist on any key, merging the red keys into the blue overlay may be for the better: you want what you offer to be extremely clear and simple to understand
Well not everything as to be from America and in English language. Different attempts are made in different countries and it's true that US attempts tend to stick, not necessarily because they are superior, but because of the general US influence.
It's true that AZERTY is an annoying layout but only because everything is made as if the only existing layout was QWERTY.
I chuckled :). How dare they use the metric system and degree Celsius? You got me curious about the WiFi channels though, but it looks like there is nothing specific to France: https://www.lairdconnect.com/support/faqs/what-channels-are-...
> How dare they use the metric system and degree Celsius?
Judgements about what they dare to do aside, isn't it fair to call those French? The metric system is based on the meter, a French unit. The International Prototype Kilogram (obsoleted only recently) was stored in France. While Celsius wasn't invented in France, a Frenchman flipped the scale (originally, freezing was 100 and boiling was 0). etc.
Not Invented Here syndrome doesn't mean that what you do invent here can't be good, that you can't sometimes get the rest of the world to agree with you, or that you abandon anything that's successful.
I'd advise the author to go one step further and adopt the ANSI layout instead of ISO. So you can just get the US version with most of the keys already etched with the correct symbol, no matter where you are in the world.
> One question though: the French seem to enjoy using different standards, for some reason.
Not French, but here's an observation: the French world has great engineering schools like the Polytechniques (Paris, Montreal, Lausanne) or Mines. And the French government historically had military procurement and R&D done inside the country as well. They are, for instance, the only country outside of the United States to have built and operate a nuclear aircraft carrier.
Totally. I once had to use a UK keyboard with this weird vertical ISO enter key - it's a pain.
I think I might live with a smaller space bar, as I got a rare IBM SK-8835 keyboard in JP locale before I could source a US one ( see: http://www.komotch2.com/junk/kj/sk8835lj.htm ): the true dealbreaker was the ISO enter key.
The carveout from the spacebar were actually pretty handy, to map with AutoHotKey extra keys staying right by my thumbs :)
> They are, for instance, the only country outside of the United States to have built and operate a nuclear aircraft carrier.
I love that a lot of countries do a lot of things: we need more alternatives to avoid duopolies (MIPS to avoid AMD64 vs ARM64, Firefox OS to avoid Android vs iOS)
And it's even better when the 3rd alternative offers unique advantages!
But using a different keyboard layout for no reason at all... sorry, I don't get that. It makes life harder for everyone, with 0 practical benefit.
It's like if some country mandated a square USB-C connector: breaking a standard, just for the pleasure of breaking it, to make things more expansive, create more e-waste, etc.
The weird part about this layout is that you can use it for English, French, German and Swedish (maybe more), but leave out exactly one Danish characther making it useless for Danish. Why leave even add æ and ø if you leave out å?
Deleted Comment
Never had any issues with Belgian AZERTY. Much prefer the useless number row to be behind the shift (there's a numpad for those anyway), and having special characters readily available on that row.
Each country has its own standards, especially with radio channels, but France seems pretty similar with other west-european countries (Wifi channels, FM radio, digital TV...).
Regarding physical keyboard layouts, mostly all the world is using the ISO layout but US are stuck with the ANSI keyboard missing one key.
Is anyone using the us keyboard outside the US? I am actually curious, it never came to my mind before.
Deleted Comment
It's preinstalled on Linux, and available for macOS and Windows as well. I feel a keyboard based on the US layout which far too often is considered a standard (better for coding and buggy software and games), with dead keys and diacritics is a fantastic idea.
I have migrated all my machines to use it instead of the custom layouts or the US one that's very restrictive when you need to write accents.
Not much 'euro', eastern europe is missing as a whole. E.g. polish Ł, czech ř, slovak ô, ... Either use dead keys for all diacritics or somehow add them all to the third and forth layer.
Wouldn't this solve much of the problems of these keyboard layouts by reusing the same letters?
Highly recommended. No idea though for any other languages other than German.
> It's preinstalled on Linux
Note that at least on Ubuntu/Debian, the included version is older and a bit different. Not unusable or anything, but not the same as on the website.
On Windows I use the US INTL layout and it works really well even for accentuated characters. Just by typing ` followed by the letter that you want accentuated, for example `e = è, even my non coder friends prefer that layout over the official Italian one.
But your keyboard it's actually pretty good in my opinion, you can write in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and probably a few more languages that I can't recognize, so I would propose to change the name to qwerty-weu (West Europe) since that seems the spirit of the project.
With that said, I don’t think I’ve typed a French accent on a physical keyboard in almost a decade. For the most part (99%), I’ve stopped reading and writing in French. On the rare occasions I need to write French formally, I usually copy and paste the accents missed by the spell checker.
I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedilla, accents, umlauts and more.
Meanwhile on macOS Big Sur, Karabiner seems to no longer work correctly (and was a royal pain to set up besides), the US International layout doesn't include a proper compose key (it just turns all punctuation keys into dead keys), and the dead keys don't even make all basic combinations (e.g. Polish "ć" or Esperanto "ĉ").
Seriously, Apple had to go out of their way to screw this up! Just tack the Unicode modifier character (e.g. U+0301) onto the end and run Unicode normalization! I get that you don't want this when you have dead keys doubling as normal keys, but dedicated dead keys (e.g. Alt+E) should just always create the character you're asking of them.
Just let me set one of my modifier keys to a proper extensible compose key!!
Any new layout is basically dead on arrival except for a few keyboard geeks. Commercial viability (as in, keyboards sold with that layout and correct keycaps) is essentially zero unless a government mandates its use. The latter is not likely in countries like France.
Making the compose-key (usually assigned to the right alt) more popular and better supported is probably the most effective way of enabling the input of letters like É, —, œ, Å, ç, ß, and € on desktop operating systems.