AZERTY amélioré: computational design on a national scale | Hacker News Reader

AZERTY amélioré: computational design on a national scale

dl.acm.org

29 pointsxept26 comments

Having worked in both Germany and France as a programmer, I just gave in, and am using an English International layout everywhere. The mental load from switching between QWERTZ, QWERTY and AZERTY (which also messes with the M key) was just too high.

There is probably some good historic explanation for why the shared characters on these keyboard layouts have been rearranged, but in practice it's so infuriating.

Although I can create every character from these three languages from an English International keyboard, of course the preinstalled international layouts on macOS, Windows and Linux differ. And if using the layout on an English/US keyboard, likely the physical key layout (~, \, Enter) is different, too.

AZERTY amélioré sure is an improvement for the French keyboard by itself, but I'd dream of a world where we have a common compose-key keyboard for all latin-alphabet based languages.

I use the US layout as well, and the compose key works very well for me. I don't type often in languages necessitating it, but when I do, it's not much of a bother. Do people who type languages with diacritics really like those localized keyboards? Personally I have to type in a handful of languages everyday (thanks to the internet I've always done so), so I wouldn't like a layout tailored to a single language. The compose key is really a godsend.

I'd say that >90% of keyboard users never think about "liking" their keyboard localization at all; if you grow up in a country with a particular standardized keyboard, it's just the one you're used to, and you deal with its quirks. On top of that, I'd guess that >50% of keyboard users still need to frequently look at the keys when they're typing, so changing keyboard layouts to one that their keyboard isn't marked up for isn't a realistic option.

For me personally, I also type in 3 different languages (two of them making use of various diacritics) frequently; my preference for the last decade or so has been to use the "normal" US-English layout for writing English prose, code, or working on the command line, and switching to US-International (w/dead keys) whenever I'm writing in a non-English language. I just find the dead keys on backticks and quotes to be especially annoying for programming.

Excellent, we get a “faster horse”.

When do we get the future we imagined 20 years ago?

https://youtu.be/PJqbivkm0Ms

I thought Soli was a step in the right direction.

https://atap.google.com/soli/

Just because it looks cool in a movie does not mean it's a practical interface for everyday use. That Minority Report scene just screams "gorilla arm". I get shoulder cramps looking at it.

Yes we’ve had that “gorilla arm” discussion before.

That’s why I tried to sidestep that discussion by mentioning Soli, which has subtle movements.

When “inventing the future”, feel free to skip what the “movies get wrong “

It's really hard to beat the ergonomics of a keyboard for things like writing, coding, and data entry. These are still important applications, they're not really amenable to literal handwaving, and a keyboard presents a dead simple solution. Dismissing improvements on the keyboard as a "faster horse" when gesture interfaces still have enormous issues to work out is silly, especially if you mention Soli -- so groundbreaking, Google left it out of phones after the Pixel 4!

And yes, the gorilla arm is but one of these issues. Gestures are vague enough to be challenging to recognize with a higher than acceptable rate of false positives and false negatives. They're also not very discoverable. Certainly there's room for research in this area, but there's also room for making working systems better.

Indeed it looks awesome in the characters enormous office where he is alone. Now imagine a software engineer 'pit' at a typical corporation, rows and rows of engineers standing waving their arms to and fro. Hell they'd need more square footage per person, that's never going to fly.

The problem with space sensing interfaces is one of intentionality. The best example of how this is hard that I can think of is that of a passive IR sensor wired to trigger opening a door. If that door is parallel to a hallway, the door will probably be opened a lot by people that have no intention whatsoever of going through the door.

It is that particular problem that is well captured by buttons: by decreasing the actual sensing area you increase the intentionality of the measurement. Furthermore, requiring specific directional movement increases it further.

Another example: the capacitive sensing 'buttons' on my washing machines can be accidentally activated by touching with the side of the arm, which can occur for instance when I'm loading detergent. That accidental activation is harder to achieve and easier to detect before accidental activation for physical buttons that have some travel.

This keyboard layout, also known as AFNOR Azerty NF Z 71-300, has since be standardized. Drivers[0] are available and keyboards[1] can be purchased.

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

Even better, there are already "drivers" in modern Linux distribution, e.g. under GNOME you have to choose "Français (AZERTY, AFNOR)" as keyboard layout.

There are a whopping 4 different AFNOR AZERTY keyboards available in the world. A shame it is not more developed.

Aside from the LDLC one, what are the 3 others? I cannot find them.

I am surprised at the prominence of ™, ® and ©. Are they commonly used when typing in french, or is this likely an issue with the sources they used? e.g. source code with copyright notices, etc.

Theres also (to my mind) some oddities around the inconsistencies around é and É, and ù and Ù where they use different modifier keys to choose the upper and lower case variations.

Tilde ~ was removed? Ezh ʒ was added?

No doubt its better now you actually have the keys you need available for the language itself - but maybe it needed a bit of curation as to their selection and consistent modifier-key selection?

No it doesn't, it has the same uses than in english and therefore the same frequency of uses.

~ is available through altgr + n (as in ñ). Easy to remember in fact

Direct link to the February 2021 article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3382035

The project web site: http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

What are the improvements? As a french programmer I switched to Qwerty because I want to be able to work anywhere I have to and it is pretty much standard. All the common programming symbols are easily reachable and I like not to have shift in order to access numbers. A compose key and/or international layout with the Alt Gr dead key works fine for me. The version with various dead key would work well if not for the weird symbol you get when you type ' twice. (In order to get a regular ' you need to ' then Space bar, could never get used to it.) I just don't understand why we are not switching either to bépo (Dvorak equivalent for french) or just have a French QWERTY, it's not that much of an effort to switch from AZERTY to QWERTY.

This layout seems to have characters which are behind Alt Gr+Shift+a right-hand key, IIUC? Yet it has no left-hand Alt Gr button? If so ... why? What was the thinking? That no-one touch-types anymore, anyway? Or is there something I'm missing here? I understand that you can get Alt Gr by holding down both Ctrl and Alt, but how do you quickly and gracefully perform a Ctrl+Alt+Shift Vulcan death grip while touch-typing? Ctrl+Alt is bad enough on its own. I assume the best technique is to try to press both Shift and Ctrl at the same time with your left little finger, but ...

We just need a compose key, stop trying to do better.

Yes, as a Spaniard who has been exposed to AZERTY in the past, I simply cannot understand the logic behind giving é, è, à, ç, and ù such arbitrary individual key allocations, which then make them explicitly untypeable as uppercase letters using the Shift (= "Majuscule") key... which as a result is required to type digits (majuscule‽). However, somehow the diaeresis ¨ and circumflex ^ diacritics deserve their own deadkey to be able to type ê and ï. I see this "improved" AZERTY leaves most of these issues untouched.

Meanwhile, in a Spanish QWERTY, reinforced by its requirement to support Catalan and Galician, ç and ñ have their own keys which can be uppercased as normal, and the acute `, grave ´, circumflex ^, and diaeresis ¨ all have their own deadkeys which can be used with any vowel character, uppercase or not.

> I simply cannot understand the logic behind giving é, è, à, ç, and ù such arbitrary individual key allocations

It's not totally arbitrary. They are used a lot, while ï and ê are less used.

Oops, answered to the wrong comment, reposting it here: One reason to prefer specific keys is accessibility for those with fine-motor issues is one. I Detailed a bit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229583. It is probably not the reason why it was designed this way but it's a nice corollary effect. Another is that those characters are used often. Way more than some other letters such as x, y, z, k and w, and using a compose key so often would be a pain.

Bepo is already a keyboard standard for that.

Bepo totally changes the layout, whereas this one does not.