I did not realize this was a thing until I just switched to AZERTY which… despite being marketed as being “similar” to QWERTY, is still tripping me up
Edit: since this came up twice: I’m switching since I’m relocating to the French-speaking part of the world & I just happened to want to learn the language/culture, so yeah
QWERTZ like any German. 🤷
I am moving from AZERTY to bépo with futo keyboard but i want to try ergo-l
This Heatmap is why I made the switch to colmak-dh.
AZERTY is not really about being similar to QWERTY. It’s the French standard keyboard layout.
Similarly QWERTZ is the German standard keyboard layout.Most (European?) countries use some variation of QWERTY with the symbols and special characters moved around to fit their respective languages better. Over here in the Netherlands we are a bit of an outlier in the sense that we use the US layout of QWERTY, but with additional modifier keys to make special characters available (It’s called US International)
There is also niche layouts like DVORAK (optimized layout for English) and BÉPO (optimized layout for French).
What is the reason you switched to AZERTY, if I may ask? I’m quite curious.
Over here in the Netherlands we are a bit of an outlier in the sense that we use the US layout of QWERTY
Tell that to Microsoft! I remember people using Windows would complain their : turned into ± etc., actually I haven’t heard that in a while now, did they finally fix that or just change the layout switching hotkey to something one doesn’t accidentally press?
I think that finally got fixed several years ago. I do remember this exact problem though…
By default both the Dutch and US International layouts would be enabled if you set up the computer to the Dutch region. And you could switch between them (accidentally) by pressing some key combination. It was highly annoying…
Yeah exactly. The key combo was ctrl+shift btw
What do all these interesting pictogram keys do?
The ringed planet is escape, the crescent is tab, the five-pointed stars are ctrl, the eye is super, and the sparkles are backspace.
I retrained myself in Dvorak many years back, and really enjoyed using it much better than QWERTY. I had to revert back to qwerty because of commercial standardizations/limitations at different workplaces, unfortunately.
All that to say that workman layout seems even better after reading that article. I don’t really see myself making the effort to switch again, but I enjoyed reading about it. Thanks for sharing.
I retrained myself in Dvorak many years back […]
It’s been a while since I’ve tried Dvorak, so I’m not very confident in my memory, but, iirc, I rememeber Dvorak causing some discomfort in my wrists. Not as bad as QWERTY, mind you, but I found that Workman was much more comfortable for me. Plus, I found that the general proximity of Workman to QWERTY, when compared with the proximity of Dvorak to QWERTY, made it much more convenient to use. For example, on Workman, copy and paste (ie
Ctrl+CandCtrl+V) are each just moved over one key to the right [1], whereas Dvorak puts them on the opposite end of the keyboard [2], that is, when comparing them with QWERTY [3].References
- Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Website. Title: “Workman Keyboard Layout”. URI: https://workmanlayout.org/.]. Accessed: 2025-07-11T23:48Z. URI: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kdeloach/workman/gh-pages/images/workman_layout.png.
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Cis 4 to the right on the bottom row.Vis 5 to the right on the bottom row.
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- Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Article. Title: “Dvorak keyboard layout”. Publisher: “Wikipedia”. Published: 2025-05-29T22:38Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout.]. Published: 2025-02-08. URI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg/1920px-KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg.png.
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Cis 8 to the right on the top row.Vis 9 to the right on the bottom row.
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- Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Article. Title: “QWERTY”. Publisher: “Wikipedia”. Published: “2025-06-18T19:29Z”. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY.]. Created: 2006-01-12. Published: 2018-11-22. Accessed: 2025-07-11T16:57Z. URI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/KB_United_States.svg/1920px-KB_United_States.svg.png.
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Cis 3 to the right on the bottom row.Vis 4 to the right on the bottom row.
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- Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Website. Title: “Workman Keyboard Layout”. URI: https://workmanlayout.org/.]. Accessed: 2025-07-11T23:48Z. URI: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kdeloach/workman/gh-pages/images/workman_layout.png.
QWERTZ, which is just the standard layout for Germany. It switches out Y and Z, adds Umlauts and changes the positions of various special characters.
I’m curious, what made you switch to AZERTY?
It is so similar to QUERTY, that I just shrugged when I accidentally ordered the wrong 15 euro keyboard. So technically I also use QUERTZ, but I still tell my PC it is a QUERTY keyboard. Fun times when someone attempts to use my PC and gets confused.
