As a resident of France, the official and widespread keyboard layout is AZERTY.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/KB_Franc... (AZERTY layout screenshot)

It looks similar to QWERTY, but some letters are swapped around[1], and some extra characters are added so that we can type in French easily — well at least that was the intent.

The big problem with this layout is that we can't type proper French with it. A lot of characters are missing, for example you can type « é » but not « É » which is its uppercase counterpart. Same goes with « ç », you need to remember to type the unicode key code with Alt+128 to type « Ç » otherwise you need to cross fingers that the autocorrect will catch it. Oh and those French quotation marks that I'm using? They are not available on AZERTY either! Even though they are the ones that should be used in French.

Another problem is that I'm a programmer and QWERTY is colloquially known as the programmers' Dvorak. Every piece of software in the world and every shortcut is meant for the QWERTY layout. Using another layout is the source of a lot of pain because intuitive shortcuts become awkward, or simply don't work at all and a lot of remapping is required.

In a nutshell, AZERTY is the worst of both worlds — the people who designed it just wanted to see the world burn apparently.

Due to this frustration I've been working on a keyboard layout that does exactly the opposite: bring the best of both worlds. This layout is called qwerty-fr.

https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/raw/master/qwerty-fr-... (QWERTY-fr layout screenshot)

It can look a bit overwhelming at first, but it's actually really simple. It is a strict superset of QWERTY, which means that anyone who knows QWERTY can type on this layout without even knowing that it's not a real QWERTY layout. Additionally, all the accentuated characters can be typed directly by combining the right Alt and another key, contrary to what it looks this is actually very convenient and doesn't slow down French typing speed noticeably.

Ιt goes further, I've added special dead keys that make it super easy to type greek and currencies (math is coming soon). Just do AltGr + g (g for “greek”) and the layout becomes:

https://i.imgur.com/pCHipNH.png (Greek layout screenshot)

You can then press any letter to type the corresponding greek character — for example “p” for “π”.

For currencies, press AltGr + Shift + 5, and the layout becomes[3]:

https://i.imgur.com/XH6gp6c.png (Currency layout screenshot)

You can then just press the letter “y” for “¥”. Easy peasy.

Next step is adding a math dead key[4], but that's for another release.

[1] Nobody knows why the A and Q were swapped, neither why the Z and W were swapped. Also why on earth is there an entire key exclusively dedicated to « ² »?!

[2] € is on AltGr + 5, which makes it easy to remember.

[3] This rendering of the currency layout is actually outdated, I've switched the positions of the currencies to make them easier to remember. For example, “p” now yields “£”. You can see the current mapping here: https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/blob/aa44310587f574cb...

[4] https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr/issues/11