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Comment by cmehdy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible.

As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.

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> since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible

You can use QWERTY with accents very easily with "International keyboard with dead keys"[1]. You can configure OS to switch keyboard with Alt+Shift to have the regular QWERTY and the International-QWERTY when you need it.

[1] https://web.cortland.edu/ponterior/keyboard/#:~:text=The%20U....

Moved from German QWERTZ and never looked back as well. I figured QWERTY with Eurkey layout[0] is a good middle ground. As it allows me to use EN_US as a base for programming, but access umlauts, accentos and such if needed.

[0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu

Have you considered the CSA layout? It's QWERTY, but the most commonly used accented characters are easily accessible. It's not ergonomic for programming, but switching between US and CSA doesn't require a significant adjustment (once you're used to it, at least).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard

Seems like a good one, and pretty fitting considering I'm in Canada right now :)

I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.

I have created my own QWERTY-US-International Keyboard Layout which puts German special letters (and other European letters) near their actual ones. With Ukulele you could do the same for the French alphabet: https://leipert.io/keyboard-layout/

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