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As a resident of France, the official and widespread keyboard layout is AZERTY.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/KB_Franc...
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-...
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
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
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 a entire key exclusively dedicated to « ² »?!
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Don't feel bad, this is pretty common to hear for us with other languages than english :-)
My go to solution for this always used to be compose keyboards on my Atari. I only recently found out (from hackernews) that there is something for windows too. [1]
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Fairly certain this is a joke. If not...yikes.
For anyone interested in escaping the world of sad layouts, check out some ortholinear options and/or ergo splits.
Also, look into QMK. For anyone who wants a more ergonomic keybind setup, check out some mnemonic namespacing stuff.
Spacevim, Spacemacs, VSpaceCode (for vs code), etc. You can always take the approach and apply it to your existing config. The three important bits are:
1. Give your thumbs more resposibility
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finsi
Custom multi-platform keyboard layout for devs used to Finnish ISO but who want a bit of US ANSI
https://github.com/samulisuomi/finsi
The readme also includes comparisons to other common layouts I see Finns using.
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There was already https://github.com/fabi1cazenave/qwerty-lafayette layout which seems to have sames goals. There is reasons why you decide make a new one ?
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