Why I switched from AZERTY
I’m french, I have been using AZERTY since my young age. My phone, my computer keyboards, and my laptop has the AZERTY layout, but I changed this 2 years ago for the US QWERTY layout.
Most of my coworkers and friends think I’m a nerd and don’t understand the point of my change, but I will never go back again.
Disadvantages
Here is the AZERTY layout :
For those who don’t know, the third character on the top row (the one with the numbers) can be accessed by pressing the Alt Gr key. As a developer, I’m heavily using all of these characters: {, [, |, \.
If I want to insert any of these characters, I need to move my right hand from 2 rows to press the Alt Gr and then do a gymnastic with the same hand to hit the key (in case the characters are on the 6/7/8/… keys). I swear, it was tiring while I was developing.
Even the number keys are not the default value, so many strokes are needed for a developer’s work.
Furthermore, I type all of my Google searches in English. Excluding the characters for development, this layout is not adapted because I spend most of my time writing things in English.
The change
I bought a Keychron keyboard with a US QWERTY layout. Developing was a breeze with it, just the two keys [, ] made the change worth it. I can type numbers without pressing the Maj key and as a bonus, I now have the default keybinds in games.
But I was facing one problem, I still need to speak French at my work and to my friends, so, I needed to find a way to type some characters used in the French language (é, è, ç, ô, …).
At first, I used the QWERTY International layout. It was a good deal, I press the key that represents the upper part of the character and then, the actual character, for example ' and e will type é.
But if I wanted to type the ' character, I needed to type ' then <space>. I was not fully satisfied.
A few weeks later, I discovered the Compose key.
It is a very popular feature in the Linux world, KDE and Gnome have this feature integrated. As I work on a GNU/Linux OS, I enabled the compose key feature on the Alt Right key.
So, yeah, again, I need to use the Alt Right key, but this time it’s only a few times per day and I don’t need to stick a finger on it to type a character.
For the é character, I type Alt Right -> ' -> e.
I can even type characters that I can’t type on French layout!
For example É, I type Alt Right -> ' -> E.
For my personal Windows usage, I installed WinCompose, and thats just work. It is hidden in the system tray and I have never looked at it since I installed it.
Don’t be afraid to change your keyboard layout like me, I learned this new layout in 2 or 3 weeks but only the first day has been really difficult. Now I’m thankful for having done that.