AZERTY Keyboards: A Rant

[Note: I have deliberately not checked any of the spellings on this post so that you can feel some of my pain.]

Even though I have been in Belgium for the best part of thirteen years and, even though the Belgians qre as fond of their biwarre keyboard layouts as the French, I have managed to avoid using an AZERTY keyboard for any significant period of time. Until noz.

Not all of the keys are in the wrong place, but there are enough of them to keep catching me out. I am not a touch-typist by any stretch of the imagination, but I knoz which keys should be where qnd am (usually) able to type reasonably quickly and reasonably accurately. Now I need to take a great deql more care with the spell checker.

This is all mildly annoying (for me) and mildly amusing (for everyone else) but when I started trying to use Vim with an AZERTY keyboard, things really became painful.

Take the movement keys (H, J, K and L), for exqmple. These are qll correctly positioned relative to each other, but some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to put the M key to the right of the L. Since I instinctively reqch for the rightmost letters on the middle row to navigate around a file, I keep using the J, K, L and M keys to go in randoml directions, or none.

(And who thought it would be a good idea to make you press shift to get at the number keys?)

But the fun really begins when I want to switch from one window to another. This is something I do quite often.

The key sequence to move one zindoz to the right used to be:
CTRL-W L

Noz it’s more like this:

• CTRL-Z
• exit the new shell I’ve accidentally started
• CTRL-W M
• curse
• ESCESC
• CTRL-Z
• swear
• exit the new shell I’ve accidentally started
• CTRL-Z
• Leave the office in order to fill the corridor with obscenities.

It takes about eight hours to get used to typing in AZERTY (as far as is possible — what bright spark thought it would be a good idea to press shift to get at the forward slash?), at which point I climb into my car, drive home and boot up my QWERTY keyboarded laptop.

If there is anyone out there successfully using Vim on an AZERTY keyboard, how on earth do you manage?

:zq

Footnote

While searching for the image at the top of this post, I stumbled across this article from 2016. It appears that the AZERTY keyboard is so ergonomically disastrous, that even the French want to get rid of it.