I bought a refurbished, mechanical keyboard that was supposed to have the German layout, but it actually has the US layout, so I cannot use it. I have been planing to sell it. Anyone interested?

Luxembourg is rich, too, and does not even have its own keyboard layout. Deal with it! ;-) And if you prefer Dvorak why not go for „clear iso“? And what’s up with you people hating „ß“ so much, anyways.

Best regards, a neighbor

Screen res/aspect sounded good however.

The alternative would have been buying a laptop with literally every key I care about in the wrong place in some local store. It's great that alternate keyboard layouts are available to those that actually need/want them but it really sucks that you get locked into these choices just because of where you are. Local shop owners don't seem to have any commercial sense whatsoever. Here's a genius idea in a city full of expats (Berlin, Munich), you know, maybe stock a few laptops with international keyboards. Even the local Apple store doesn't do that. And any time you go there, a very meaningful percentage of the customers is clearly not German.

Every non German buying a German keyboard because they have to is basically an unhappy customer. I know loads of foreigners here moaning about German keyboards. I've never met a non German that actually prefers having keys in the wrong place. That's not a thing; it's bloody annoying. It's equally annoying in other countries where expats live. E.g. French keyboard layouts are worse, AZERTY instead of QWERTY. At least in Germany you get QWERTZ (Y and Z are swapped). I've actually met quite a few German programmers that remap their keyboards so they can program without having to use four fingers to produce a single key-press.

We'll buy whatever layout new staff want, but we keep spares of these two around.

(British gives the European physical layout with the additional key and double height enter key.)

I am using this layout for more than 1 year for programming and writing in french, and it's really good. I find it even better that the international keyboard layout or qwerty.

The fact that they have considered both the programming language approach AND the natural language typing is a real pleasure.

[0] https://norme-azerty.fr/ and https://github.com/springcomp/optimized-azerty-win [1] https://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00279741.html

2. I once did an exchange semester of university in France, where i was forced to use their computers for programming. Not only did I start 2 weeks after the other students due to timing issues with my primary university, but then I also had some very stressful weeks learning to program on azerty keyboards. It was very painful at first and i nearly went back to two-finger typing, but in the end after 5 months i became more fluent than i expected on azerty.

3. 3 years ago (i was around 24 years old) I decided to switch from my layout i used until then (ISO, swiss french) to the Ansi Us layout, and I am happy i did the switch. It is so much better for programming, especially wrt to [] {} (). And I even prefer typing diacritics by using US international. I write fluently in french and german with this and I like it. The main pain point was switching from vertical to horizontal enter, I typed \ for months...

Note: This keyboard layout is not just about English/French anymore. You can now type pretty much every latin language in the world: Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, German, Italian, Català, Dutch, Danish, Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Serb, and many more but my fingers are already hurting.

Now… Time for the sales pitch!

~~~~~~~~~

Are you tired of the limitations and inconvenience of the AZERTY keyboard layout when trying to type in French? Introducing QWERTY-fr, the ultimate keyboard layout for French and English language users! This layout is based on the widely used QWERTY layout, but with added symbols and diacritics to make typing in French easy and fast. Plus, it's easy to learn! With QWERTY-fr, you'll no longer have to rely on autocorrect to fix the shortcomings of AZERTY.

QWERTY-fr also eliminates the frustrating letter swaps and shuffled symbols of AZERTY, making software shortcuts and remapping a thing of the past. Plus, you'll be able to type special characters like "É" and "Ç" with ease.

Our layout follows a strict superset of the QWERTY layout, meaning all keys are in the same location, so QWERTY users can easily transition to QWERTY-fr. To type special characters with diacritics, there are simple rules to follow. AltGr corresponds to Option on macOS and Ctrl Alt on Windows. With AltGr and the corresponding letter, you can type characters like the grave accent, acute accent, circumflex, diaeresis, cedilla, and ligature.

So why settle for the limitations of AZERTY when you can have the best of both worlds with QWERTY-fr? Try it out online without installing it and join our Telegram community to discuss and provide feedback with other users. Don't miss out on this game-changing keyboard layout!

(Courtesy of ChatGPT.)

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.

Fun fact: amayon.de redirects to amazon.de

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.

(I'm half joking, half serious - I grew up with a qwertz DE nodeadkey layout which certainly doesn't look sane from the outside either and exclusively use the US one now)