As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops. Usually when I use a non-Thinkpad, it’s someone else’s laptop and I look like an idiot in front of them wondering why their copy and paste is broken.

I get that the function key isn’t technically a standard key on the keyboard (I’ve only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout dating back the IBM days, but it’s still annoying.

AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).

But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it’s faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me:

• all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter
• cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that’s exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean “ć”), same for ñ
• English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key

Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn’t insane

As an azerty user, I don’t see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It’s super easy to do on linux, no?

You should be able to use the Compose key on Linux for easy typing of accented characters. eg. Compose ’ e = é

French Canadian keyboard is QWERTY but with all kind of symbol, like the 1 to = top row can give

with shift !"/$%?&*()_+

with altcar ±@£¢¤¬¦²³¼½¾

We also have the µ¯§¶«»°

and we can do all kind of Èîöç etc

I actually use Coleman for work. It feels so much nicer to type on vs qwerty. It reduces same finger movement (like e & d on qwerty) and enables common synergies, like ie/ei, ne/en, sr/rs, ar, st/ts, etc. It was also easy to switch to vs other layouts like Dvorak because it keeps important hotkeys where they should be, like ctrl+a/q/z/x/c/v so you don’t accidentally close a program while trying to select all.

I still use QWERTY often for my home PC because I play games and type at the same time and don’t want to change every hot key for every game.

can confirm, it’s the worst

In defence of the µ, I actually use it more than the other two, for micro- units.

The ¤ is the symbol for any currency but I have never seen it used in the wild.

I hate AZERTY so much it hurts my brains

Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.

At least with Azerty, you don’t run into it in the wild.

The worst layout is alphabetical, because sometimes you are forced to use it.

Not really, but I switched from Qwerty to Workman years ago, though I can live with Qwerty if I have to when it’s on someone else’s machine.

I use Workman because I found Colemak rather hard to learn, mostly because of the position of S being one over from where it was on Qwerty.

DK/SE layout is surprisingly good for european languages, say better than the Italian one

If you don’t like BÉPO because you want familiar letter-based clipboard shortcuts, you’ve already made a better layout selection impossible. I learned to use the older clipboard shortcuts: ctrl+ins for copy, shift+ins for paste, and shift+del for cut. Those are still as universally supported.