Is France's AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?

Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.

The Mac keyboard is also bearable.

If your operating system supports it, you can bind any key to the compose key, such as the right alt key.

Here's a link to several options to get software support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Software_support.

I have opted for a US layout a few years ago, regardless of the OS. And I cannot myself going back to a UK/FR layout. Thanks god I don't speak any other language. :p

Go to preferences in the Dictionary application.

Norwegian keyboards have a different physical layout meaning different character codes are sent for the same location.

Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks.

You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)

It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.

I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.

Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1.

There are 6 layers, but you have to consider that uppercase and lowercase is almost the same. The layers 5 and 6 are not in my usage pattern. Layer 4 is one of the easiest to learn, because it maps the right hand to the numpad and the left one to arrows like sdfe in computer games. a for pos1 and g for end. So there is some easy logic behind this.

At the end there is just layer 3. The organisation of the braces is that they appear in pairs and are arranged in a pattern.

So in Zurich they do a little bit more french as in germany. So I didn't had to use accents a lot. So I can't say a lot about it. èéâǎȩẽ. These characters are a little bit away from the optimal position. But they do not need a Compose Button. èéâ only needs two button strokes. ǎȩẽ needs the Shift button for the first stroke. But the accents are every time on the same position just on different layers. A little bit difficult to explain. Especially if you have not used accents before.

What I would suggest is to take neo2 as a basic layout, take the good parts and addapt it to the usage pattern of the french language.

Other people's computers are easy if they run Linux (setxkbmap de neo) and okay if they run Windows (there's a no-install no-admin tool to remap), but you can't switch a Mac temporarily without installing the keyboard layout and even then getting the layers to work is awful. So I'd say you're half-right about that.

I have no issue with the shortcuts, it takes a while to learn them anew but they're no less convenient because of it. I started using Emacs years after Neo and I have no complaints about the keymappings, so it really can't be that bad ;)