AZERTY keyboards are better :)
Oh you gotta love those absolutely non provocative titles.
I only use AZERTY keyboards. I’m useless with a QWERTY (or worse, the swiss QWERTZ). Each time people tried to use my PC in the office, they sat down, typed for 10 seconds, stopped, looked confused, looked down at the keyboard… and asked me why the hell I wasn’t using a “normal” keyboard.
So, for the records: the AZERTY keyboard (or at least the AZERTY layout, I guess none of you still looks at the keyboard while typing, right?) is more efficient for coding, because it gives you the best of both worlds:
- if you want to type a number, you can use the numeric keypad on the right. Sorry guys, I know a lot of you hate it and just never use it, but hey, I grew up with this thing typing hexadecimal numbers from source code published in magazines. Trust me: for entering a lot of numbers at the same time, nothing beats the keypad.
- if you want to type a bunch of symbols widely used while programming, like:
& ” ‘ ( ) - _ = ! :
…well they are all available without pressing SHIFT. All of them. Compare this to the QWERTY layout which “wastes” keys by having “redundant” direct entries for all the numbers. Forcing you to press SHIFT much more often than AZERTY users.
So, AZERTY, less SHIFT pressing, better.
What do you mean you’re not convinced ?!
June 25th, 2009 at 5:26 am
I agree on the numpad: it’s just so much faster to type numbers with it, and using only one hand - you’ve probably seen the quite famous LDLC cashier lady, in Paris XXIIe
On programming on the other hand… some symbols are accessed faster (the one you mention), others are not: {}[]#|\^@ require using intricate hand movements with AltGr + some keys at the top of the keyboard. I found the Qwerty layout to be slightly faster (not by a huge margin). Well I can use either so I don’t mind whichever is available actually (as long as it’s standard qwerty or standard azerty, not some Swiss or Canada/Quebec weird layouts).
June 25th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
A really funny fact about AZERTY : it’s a keyboard specifically designed by French for French, but it lacks some characters. You can’t type Œ, œ, Ç, «, » which are all very used in French. Not to say you can’t type É, meaning you can’t type a sentence in full capital without making mistakes.
Of course, you can type all those on a Mac AZERTY keyboard (just by pressing caps lock, which doesn’t have the same behavior as SHIFT in OS X). But coding on Mac is a real nightmare since { and } are not directly available (they’re not even indicated on the keyboard). Even more funny, if you develop for OSX or iPhone, you must use Objective-C which makes heavy use of [ and ], also not directly available on the Mac AZERTY keyboard.
Thank you all keyboard-guru for making our life easier.
(and don’t start me on Dvorak)
June 25th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Surprisingly many people actually look at keyboard while typing - at least some of the time. Some years ago I rearranged the keys on my keyboard at workplace (but not actually switching the layout). Didn’t take too long until I noticed that some ppl were puzzled out when they were trying to something to me on my computer and tried to type stuff in.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
On the other side, the []{} characters aren’t that easy to use on a AZERTY keyboard (you have to use the Alt Gr key) and they are pretty common in C. But since QWERTY users still have to use shift for the {} characters, this is not a big difference.