Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout

by noname120 • 5 years ago

156 130 5 years ago

noname12010• 5 years ago

As a resident of France, the official and widespread keyboard layout is AZERTY.

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

scastiel• 5 years ago

Have you tried the Canadian-French layout? It’s pretty much what you were looking for ;)

noname12010• 5 years ago

I find the Canadian-French layout[1] to be pretty hard to learn, because the placement of characters is confusing. For example:

– ± is on key 1 (?)

– ² is on key 8 (?!)

– can't directly type éèêë, àâä, ùûü, ìîï[2].

– € is not available (big oops for a French keyboard layout).

– œ and æ are not available either.

– no support for no-break space and narrow no-break space (they are mandatory in French around punctuation).

QWERTY-fr aims to be super easy to learn if you know QWERTY thanks to its logical philosophy — you can read about it here[3].

What do you think? :)

[1] http://kbdlayout.info/KBDCA/

[2] You need to press a dead key first, which is awkward and slow. The fact that dead keys are placed seemingly randomly makes it even worse.

[3] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#-philosophy-overview

leblancfg• 5 years ago

Here's a link to the MacOS version layout for alt-codes, which I believe handles all your points except the last: https://i.stack.imgur.com/v1ZLm.png

Zealotux• 5 years ago

As a French, I consider the Spanish (Spain) keyboard to be the ultimate layout, that one doesn't look bad but way too bloated.

hadrien01• 5 years ago

Same here. I've been using the Spanish layout for fifteen years now, and it's so natural to use with a QWERTY layout and diacritics even on uppercase.

noname12010• 5 years ago

Contrary to QWERTY-fr, you can't type accentuated letters directly with the Spanish layout[1]. I find that it considerably lowers my speed when typing French.

I agree that QWERTY-fr looks bloated on the first look, but the position of keys actually make sense so it is super easy to learn. I recommend you to read the philosophy[2] behind this keyboard layout.

What do you think?

[1] https://www.goodtyping.com/teclatESP.png

[2] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#-philosophy-overview

enriquto• 5 years ago

As a resident of France

Yet your keyboard layout does not allow to type the characters needed for all the languages of France. For example, in Catalan we need "í". Unless you add all possible combinations of accent+letter, the asymmetry between the characters that are already composed and the ones that need AltGR is annoying.

I write regularly in many languages, mostly French, and I hate the AZERTY layout, mainly due to it having (some) already composed accented characters.

1_player2• 5 years ago

What about EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

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.

abrowne3• 5 years ago

EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/
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.

ReleaseCandidat2• 5 years ago

What about EurKey? https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

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.

lopis• 5 years ago

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?

1_player2• 5 years ago

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

JeremyTheo• 5 years ago

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.

fowlie2• 5 years ago

It works very well for Norwegian too.

nomdep• 5 years ago

Isn’t the same as US-International?

xcambar• 5 years ago

As a french and a developer and a resident of Germany, I have a lot of special characters to write :p

I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedilla, accents, umlauts and more.

Freak_NL• 5 years ago

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.

oezi• 5 years ago

I wonder why CAPS isn't used more as a compose key. It is easier to reach than Alt+gr.

lkuty• 5 years ago

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.

colanderman• 5 years ago

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!!

miguelrochefort• 5 years ago

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.

argentinian• 5 years ago

It's not the same idea because it doesn't try to make it look like querty, but the colemak layout allows typing characters from most languages with a modifier key and sometimes (for the less common characters) a combo. In this link it illustrates this https://colemak.com/Multilingual

And linux (or at least Ubuntu) includes it by default. For spanish and german it's great.

DocTomoe• 5 years ago

You seem to be trying to solve a problem that could easily be solved by using a Compose key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

abrowne3• 5 years ago

I recently switched from compose key to this layout (and suggested to the developer to update the Linux release ;-) and it is much nicer to type eg AltGr+a for à instead of Compose+` then a. (I keep compose on PrtSc for extra characters like arrows.)

Foobar8568• 5 years ago

Swiss layout is the best layout for French speakers

noname12010• 5 years ago

Can you type « Ç » and « É » with the Swiss layout[1]? What about the French quotation marks (« »)?

[1] https://www.goodtyping.com/teclatSWI.htm

herbst2• 5 years ago

At least on Linux Swiss Standard layout you'll get all of those if you know the right keys. You basically choose the accent, then the letter and get what you want.

I wasn't even aware that this seems to be a common problem in other layouts / oses

csdvrx5• 5 years ago

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?

noname12010• 5 years ago

Thank you! :)

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. :)

laurent123456• 5 years ago

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.

csdvrx5• 5 years ago

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

tbassetto• 5 years ago

the French seem to enjoy using different standards

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-...

scottlamb• 5 years ago

> 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.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

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.

csdvrx5• 5 years ago

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.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

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?

jonsen• 5 years ago

I don't think we've met. I'm Danish. I use the US keyboard layout.

elros• 5 years ago

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 :-)

kaetemi• 5 years ago

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.

hyakosm3• 5 years ago

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.

herbst2• 5 years ago

the US Qwerty keyboard is the standard for programmers

Is anyone using the us keyboard outside the US? I am actually curious, it never came to my mind before.

Oddskar• 5 years ago

Looks interesting. Definitely a step up from AZERTY which when I've looked at it seems to have been put together by someone who insists on holding French programmers back.

This still puts a lot of emphasis on right-most part, which makes this quite unbalanced for programmers I think.

Personally I would never go back to any layout that doesn't have a numpad and all special chars a programmer needs without moving the fingers 1 row up or down.

Once one gets used to this everything else seems archaic.

andrewstuart• 5 years ago

I wish all keyboards had dedicated cut/copy/paste buttons.

bloopernova2• 5 years ago

Get yourself a macro pad. I have a KeebIO BDN9 rev2: https://keeb.io/collections/frontpage/products/bdn9-rev-2-3x... - It requires some soldering, but there's other versions and types of macropad that don't need assembling.

Here's mine, top left: https://imgur.com/gallery/Pa51o8c

(apologies, that was the image I had immediately available)

  Top row is volume, Emacs save (ctrl-x ctrl-s), scroll/zoom
  Middle row is layer change, Meta-x (command palette in Emacs), Ctrl-g (quit/escape in Emacs)
  Bottom row is Meta, Super, Esc-c (in my zsh, it runs "fd --type directory" in the fzf tool, which lets me type a few characters of a directory to cd to it, however deep it is)

Macro pads can be controlled by QMK firmware (which I use) which is reconfigured by editing c code. There's also VIA firmware which is also very flexible. Other manufacturers will have their own proprietary systems.

leshenka• 5 years ago

I wish all keyboards had rotary encoders for volume control. It is so much nicer to use than spamming vol+/vol- buttons

axegon_• 5 years ago

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.

iKnowKungFoo• 5 years ago

I read that as "QWERTY For Real". :)

noname12010• 5 years ago

I chuckled haha :)

xupybd• 5 years ago

I was about to say why do we need another layout but this appears to solve real problems that I've never encountered as an English speaker.

Moru2• 5 years ago

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]

[1] http://wincompose.info/

tpfour• 5 years ago

Try the Canadian Multilingual French layout on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

à is \

è is '

é is /

ç is ]

accent grave is right-alt+[+letter

and

"specials" are right-alt+num (±@£¢¤¬{}[]) but for any glyph used in programming, I usually switch back to US keyboard using alt+caps-lock. Ça fonctionne très bien pour moi!

emilecantin• 5 years ago

On a ISO layout (with the inverted-L "enter" key), you also get ù between left shift and z.

Accolades ({}) and brackets ([]) are on alt-7-8 and alt-9-0. A bit annoying to type, but manageable. At least it's somewhat logical (pairs are next to one another).

What's nice is that this is the default French layout for Apple computers in Canada, so you can order one with the correct keys printed on it: https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/MK2C3LL/A/magic-keyboa...

hyakosm3• 5 years ago

Unfortunately this layout seems mostly unavailable with PC keyboards (I only seen a Lenovo model).

hyakosm3• 5 years ago

The CSA layout is pretty nice, I use it everywhere (writing French and writing code) and don't have problems with {}[]() because these characters are juxtaposed (unlike the french AZERTY).

aiibe• 5 years ago

Tested on Windows 10 with no issues.

I use QWERTY for coding but sometimes need to document other things in French. This is a pain killer.

penjelly• 5 years ago

i like the idea of using a keyboard layout thats more efficient for typing common characters, less finger travel. But the thought of having to relearn muscle memory and not being able to just grab any old keyboard are both huge turnoffs for me.

i assume for #2 i could programmatically remap keys with no effect in input latency? which then would require merely changing a few keycaps around... can anyone confirm if this would be the case?

speedgoose• 5 years ago

I personally use the bépo layout which, to me, feels better than qwerty or azerty layouts. Have you tried to use the bépo layout?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%89PO https://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil

noname12010• 5 years ago

Yes I did! I actually used to have bépo as my primary keyboard layout.

My main problem with it is that it only optimizes French, and it (implicitly) deoptimizes everything else. For example “W” is awkwardly placed at the very edge of the keyboard, which makes typing English pretty annoying. Keyboard shortcuts are pretty inconvenient as well.

Imho bépo is great if you write pages of raw text every day in French — for example journalists and writers. But apart from this it's not pragmatic for other usages — and I want my keyboard layout to be good enough everywhere, not just at typing French.

airstrike• 5 years ago

How about just using Qwerty + US International?

áéàèçæöäëïüî ÁÉÀÈÇÆ...

You can even do «» with Alt Gr+[ and ] and € with Alt Gr+5

JeanSebTr• 5 years ago

Yes! As a French Canadian, that's my preferred layout.

Its advantage is that it uses dead keys to add diacritic.

For instance (Alt Gr+i then [normal vowel key]) will give îôêâ... You just have to know the diacritic position and press the normal letter to apply it.

aloisdg• 5 years ago

This is what I do to.

3np2• 5 years ago

aka us-altgr-intl. Sounds to me like the author may not be aware of it, as it addresses all their major motivations

davidinosauro• 5 years ago

Are you referring to "US International with AltGr dead keys"? I use it too for programming, English text and sporadic Italian text -- so I'm not annoyed by the dead keys unless I actively look for them.

FWIW, growing up in Italy I have the same complaint as the OP about not being able to type È in the italian keyboard -- it comes up somewhat often in prose.

My only complaint is that I occasionally write to colleagues named Paweł or Michał which are not typable

makeva• 5 years ago

As a French Belgian that's what I use too. "US International with AltGr dead keys" Find it easier for programming. Haven't got much success in converting others though.

shimonabi• 5 years ago

As someone who started to learn French just a few years ago, I was really shocked that you couldn't easily type certain characters on a standard French keyboard.

I discovered the "voluntary" AZERTY Z71-300 standard since then and I've been using it since on Windows.

https://norme-azerty.fr/

Tagbert• 5 years ago

Does anyone make a small auxiliary keyboard, similar to a freestanding numpad, that can be programmed for various characters and functions? I would love to be able to setup a custom keyboard for special characters that I need repeatedly but don’t want to have to force them onto the regular keyboard.

djbeadle• 5 years ago

I believe you're looking for a "macropad". I recently bought this one from Adafruit and while not life changing it is pretty nifty especially combined with BetterTouchTool.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128

frederikvs• 5 years ago

Search the web for "macropad", you should find what you need. If you go for something QMK-based, you can program it any way you want.

simlevesque• 5 years ago

As a francophone, I've always used Canadien Multilingue Standard, it's perfect if your goal is to write english and french.

giaour• 5 years ago

Seconded! I taught French in the US, and Canada multilingual was the most ergonomic way to switch between languages without switching keyboard layouts.

timost• 5 years ago

I use linux UK international layout. Like AZERTY, it's an ISO based layout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards...

It's not available on windows though, so I had to hack a lenovo thinkpad external keyboard to make it compatible with QMK to be able to work properly at my current job.

stavros• 5 years ago

Hmm, why is the Greek layout not the same as the el keyboard layout? I know it's geared towards the French language, but it seems needlessly complicated to map the Greek letters differently from the Greek layout...

baby2• 5 years ago

The official and widely spread keyboard layout in France is AZERTY. Compared to QWERTY, it adds extra letters such as « é » and « ç ». Unfortunately a lot of characters are missing, for example it's impossible to type « É » or « Ç ». It's also impossible to type the French quotation marks (« »), and other special characters such as « œ » and « æ ». French users usually rely on autocorrect to fix the shortcomings of AZERTY, which is unacceptable.

I would argue that we should just get rid of accents on uppercase letters, and that we should get rid of characters like œ and æ. Also what is the point of having different quotation marks? Even in english. Language gets simpler over time, let's just take a shortcut.

version_five2• 5 years ago

If you were writing something formal for work, and were told to just get rid of essential characters or punctuation in your working language and adopt those of another language, do you think your audience would be OK with that?

baby2• 5 years ago

I'm not talking about adopting those of another language, I'm talking about L’Académie française changing the rules of the language, like they've done multiple times to simplify the language[1]. Do you find all these extra accents confusing? Most French people do as well, and most people do not use them correctly anyway (even in writing). It's not just French people, my SO is Romanian and they have the same issue and will often omit their special characters when writing.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifications_orthographiques...

benhurmarcel2• 5 years ago

Accents on uppercase letters aren’t just about typography though, it can actually change the meaning.

zokier2• 5 years ago

I did too create my own keyboard layout based on us-intl layout because the local (fi/sv) native keyboard is pretty bad. I took bit more liberties with the layout to be more of a compromise (;:<> were moved around to make space for öä), but overall I'm really happy with the result and recommend better keyboard layouts to any non-US developers/power-users.

US-intl layout: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDUSX/

Finnish layout: https://kbdlayout.info/KBDFI/

Note how all of ~[]{}\$@| are only accessible with altgr.

My layout: https://kbdlayout.info/06e90945-d036-4d0b-9627-7e840edf9b4e

h3mb3• 5 years ago

A shameless plug of another Finnish/US hybrid: https://github.com/samulisuomi/finsi

The readme also includes comparisons to other common layouts I see Finns using.

zokier2• 5 years ago

I suppose your's looks like reasonable if you want minimum changes to FI layout. Personally I don't the tradeoff is worth it compared to the superior ergonomics of more US based layout like mine, especially considering the large amount of special characters that are not available in FI layout at all.

athenot• 5 years ago

I switched from AZERTY to QWERTY and can type French nearly as fast. On the Mac, doing Éé, Èè, Îî, Ôô, Öü, Ïï, etc is not noticeably slower.

tom_• 5 years ago

The BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum used ASCII 0x60 for £, the early 1980s probably being about the last time you could design a computer without caring what Americans thought. Maybe you could sort-of follow that trend, by squeezing £ onto the ~` key somewhere, and cover even more of Europe-the-continent with the basic layout?

(Why does the 102nd key (between left shift and Z) have another copy of < and >? This is good in a sense, because the layout works for both ANSI- and ISO-type keyboards. But it does seem a bit redundant.)

While as a longstanding US-Dvorak user, I would not contemplate switching back to QWERTY, this layout does look very sensible. I particularly like the US-style punctuation placement. (Far superior, in my view! " in particular is very convenient.)

yosito• 5 years ago

I found the AZERTY Wikipedia page to be interesting as well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY

timeon• 5 years ago

you can type « é » but not « É »

There are QWERTY (and QWERTZ) keyboard that could do that. Like Czech or Slovak one.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

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":

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.

function_seven• 5 years ago

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.

brokenmachine• 5 years ago

Another problem is that I'm a programmer and QWERTY is colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak.

Don't know if you mistyped here, but QWERTY is definitely NOT colloquially known as programmers' Dvorak. They're totally different layouts.

pneto• 5 years ago

It's just a joke. Dvorak was supposed to be ergonomic but it is painful for programmers because our most common shortcuts are designed for qwerty.

spacemanmatt• 5 years ago

IMO new keyboard layouts should all reflect usage-frequency. (Full disclosure: lifer dvorak user)

js8• 5 years ago

My proposal is that we put keyboard switches and their caps on LEGO-like studs, so that anybody can create whatever physical keyboard layout they want.

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

There is no reason for creating custom layouts to be hard (or require any physical manipulations). There just are no good apps for this.

Windows lets you modify the "locale" easily (something I do every time I install Windows) and also has MSKLC which is rather good (but could be made easier and integrated in the Control Panel).

Other OSes expect everyone to stick to a standard, nevertheless allow custom locales and keyboard layouts too, just a user-unfriendly way, begging for a 3rd party to come up with an app to make that accessible to mere mortals.

rgoulter2• 5 years ago

The Dumang keyboard uses magnets: http://xahlee.info/kbd/dumang_dk6.html

gefhfff• 5 years ago

Thanks, this is what I need (de+es)

tytrdev• 5 years ago

For anyone interested in escaping the world of sad layouts, check out some ortholinear options and/or ergo splits.

https://olkb.com/

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

2. Namespace actions under an ergonomic leader key, using mnemonics

3. Use a discoverability plugin like which-key to help discover new keybinds

rossdavidh• 5 years ago

I like it! I used your web page to type: Nazgûl Mötley Crüe Noël Queensrÿche ...and it was easy! Unfortunately, no option to type Die Arzte, the German band that invented a triple-dotted capital A character to make fun of gratuitous diacritics. But seriously, I approve!

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

useful if you don't have the AltGr key

Who doesn't? Isn't AltGr just the right Alt?

stevage• 5 years ago

QWERTY is colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak

[citation needed]

I use Dvorak for coding, and it works just fine. Sometimes I use layouts where holding cmd/ctrl reverts to QWERTY (so that Ctrl+C is where it is on QWERTY), but it doesn't really matter that much.

Incidentally, I once made a layout with similar ideas to this one, but based on Dvorak. I was living in France, and just needed an easier way to access French symbols. I didn't go quite as far as this - for all the diaeresis symbols I just relied on Altgr-:, then letter.

I'm a bit skeptical about some choices like placing ÿ on the same key as H. It's such a rarely used letter I'm not sure how you would ever learn that it was on that key, since there's no underlying logic to it.

OJFord• 5 years ago

I'm a bit skeptical about some choices like placing ÿ on the same key as H. It's such a rarely used letter I'm not sure how you would ever learn that it was on that key, since there's no underlying logic to it.

I thought that was odd at first, since y/Y does leave unused space for it, but the logic (diaeresis: AltGr + key below the main letter) is explained: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr#-philosophy-overview

atbpaca• 5 years ago

I'm French and I can't understand why people can't use QWERTY configured as US-International keyboard. All accents and most symbols for latin-characters languages (english, french, spanish, etc), lower & upper cases, etc, available. Voilà!

mercxry• 5 years ago

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.

benhurmarcel2• 5 years ago

The annoying part of the “US International” layout is having to type a space after the key to produce a ‘ or “.

asimops• 5 years ago

The problem I would have with this and Windows is, that Windows defines [crtl]+[alt] and [alt gr] to be the same thing... So if I wanted to type an ä ([alt gr]+[a]), my keepass global autotype ([ctrl]+[alt]+[a]) would pop up instead -.-'

So I had to settle with WinCompose to do proper non english languages.

https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

Did anybody get this fixed in Windows? If so, please send help! Also if you are inside Microsoft and know the correct team to adress this to, please for gods sake, point them to this issue.

allanrbo• 5 years ago

Strange and fascinating that AZERTY has a dedicated ² key. Searched a bit but couldn't find any discussion on why. Any theories?

insertrealname• 5 years ago

I believe it's for a superscripted 2 after abbreviations of units of measure, denoting area, e.g. centimeter squared, metre squared, etc.

goerz• 5 years ago

I strongly second the virtues of extending a standard US QWERTY layout to your specific needs. I’ve done a “ U.S. International - Scientific ” keyboard layout myself that aims more for German and math Unicode: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/the-us-international-scientif...

Been using that for years in one form or another.

ivegotnoaccount• 5 years ago

Nice idea, but as a french with slight dispraxia/hand coordination issues (If I am typing fast, at least half of the time I write "function" will become "function", and that's without special keys in the mix), it seems like even after learning it, I probably would have a greater error rate than with AZERTY:

One of the big advantage of the current layout is that, except for some rare cases such as "ë", special characters are the primary letter of the key instead of numbers like in QWERTY. Even ê, which need composition with ^, has the advantage to have both symbols on the same hand so there are not much coordination issues.

The only current common daily-life cases where I need complex coordination that I can think of are: - End of sentence+uppercase for the new one: not a big issue as the end of a sentence usually is a natural point to slow a bit as the next one will have another mental context. - Acronyms, names: An issue, but I usually don't right three of them per line. - Special characters uppercase. I agree with the author on those, but on the other hand, many simply do not write them and for a long time, most people were even told it was a mistake to put accents on uppercase even when hand-writing. So this one is only a big issue with those that are quite pedantic about using special characters on uppercase. - Programming: This one is a non-issue as the bottleneck is not my typing speed so I can take my time. - numbers: I choose laptops with numpads

On the other hand, accents are everywhere and can pop up in the middle of a word: "Loïc, tu pourrais aller chercher du pain à la boulangerie où on a mangé hier ?". To write this, I currently have 3 hard sequences, 2 if we count Loïc as a single one. With a keyboards where all accents are special cases, that becomes 5 or 4. If the "?" had been a "." and we count Loïc as one, it would be 3, so in both cases, AZERTY, to me, seem easier to use.

I am not saying this layout is a bad idea and should not be standardized, but at least personally, I would have a hard time with it.

fenouil• 5 years ago

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 ?

feikname• 5 years ago

I think as a keyboard for French language, this is great.

However, the affirmation “extra characters are added so that one can effortlessly type in French (as well German, Spanish, Italian, etc.)” doesn't really hold well IMO. For example, there's “é” but no “áíúó” keys. This lack of acute diacritic for other vowels is a big dealbreaker for Spanish and Portuguese. Possibly, others too.

As someone used to the Brazilian (ABNT2) keyboard, I think dedicated keys for characters with diacritics is not the way. Typing with diacritics for dead keys to the right is just as easy, if not more, as using alt gr, with the advantage of having more free keys.

Otherwise, this is great.

BTW, I like how this is closer to US keyboard than ABNT2, which switched the `~ key for quotes and makes typing stuff such as ``` for blocks of code a big pain, and annoying to open developer console in Source games. ABNT2 also annoyingly switched braces location to be vertically stacked.

Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout

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