Worst keyboard layouts?

As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops. Usually when I use a non-Thinkpad, it's someone else's laptop and I look like an idiot in front of them wondering why their copy and paste is broken.

I get that the function key isn't technically a standard key on the keyboard (I've only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout dating back the IBM days, but it's still annoying.

can confirm, it’s the worst

I actually use Coleman for work. It feels so much nicer to type on vs qwerty. It reduces same finger movement (like e & d on qwerty) and enables common synergies, like ie/ei, ne/en, sr/rs, ar, st/ts, etc. It was also easy to switch to vs other layouts like Dvorak because it keeps important hotkeys where they should be, like ctrl+a/q/z/x/c/v so you don’t accidentally close a program while trying to select all.

I still use QWERTY often for my home PC because I play games and type at the same time and don’t want to change every hot key for every game.

Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.

Try the Canadian French layout, it's a much saner French layout IMO.

It focuses on communication, so I use it in combination with the US layout so I can type programming-related characters.

If you don't like BÉPO because you want familiar letter-based clipboard shortcuts, you've already made a better layout selection impossible. I learned to use the older clipboard shortcuts: ctrl+ins for copy, shift+ins for paste, and shift+del for cut. Those are still as universally supported.

This isn't really what you asked, but I feel the need to share my experience using an alternate layout.

I used to use the Dvorak layout - for several years, in fact, and I was pretty good with it. I switched back to Qwerty, because Dvorak just caused too many issues, especially at work, and any speed gains were lost in dealing with switching the layout for tech support and things like that. Sometimes they'd remote in and type, and it would translate their keypresses incorrectly.

Now I doubt they'd even let me switch the keyboard layout (a function they don't expect people to need, so they lock it out to reduce the chance of someone accidentally triggering it).

Qwerty does the job, I guess.

I worked in France for a while and I deeply agree with everything you said... Except μ is by far the most useful Greek letter since it is used as a prefix for units of measurement, e.g. μm, μL, etc.

Also the Swiss layout is even worse, it combined all the bad features of the French and German keyboards and then just moves around all the symbols a bit more for good measure.

Your story reminds me of diving a French car for the first time. No knob or lever can be found in the usual spaces and in the end you always end up giving a turn signal when you try to use the windscreen wiper.

I am using the German QWERTZ most of the time and found the layout rather reasonable. I once tried to learn the neo layout which had the most used letters on the middle row, but you really only can use that at home so I stopped after a week or two as it did not really seemed worth the effort.

Czecho-Slovak QWERTZ is fine, but it annoys me that you have to guess whether a keyboard is set to QWERTY or QWERTZ. Z and Y are the only characters that are switched. I gave up as I frequently switch to English QWERTY; now I just use QWERTY for both languages.

At least with Azerty, you don't run into it in the wild.

The worst layout is alphabetical, because sometimes you are forced to use it.

Those parentheses and brackets are unhinged.

In defence of the µ, I actually use it more than the other two, for micro- units.

The ¤ is the symbol for any currency but I have never seen it used in the wild.

DK/SE layout is surprisingly good for european languages, say better than the Italian one

AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).

But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it's faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me:

• all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter
• cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that's exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean "ć"), same for ñ
• English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key

As an azerty user, I don't see the issue with the uppercase accent letter. It's super easy to do on linux, no?

At some point, uppercase letters were written without accent in French. I'm unsure where this comes from, but I heard this was due to the limitations of printing presses, and then typewriters kept the convention.

In any case, the style is quite out of fashion today, but I know people who still write (handwriting and typing) without using accented uppercase letters.

French Canadian keyboard is QWERTY but with all kind of symbol, like the 1 to = top row can give

with shift !"/$%?&*()_+

with altcar ±@£¢¤¬¦²³¼½¾

We also have the µ¯§¶«»°

and we can do all kind of Èîöç etc

I grew up en français, albeit in Canada. In our informatique classes, we had CSA standard layout keyboards (IBM, not Microsoft).

It's essentially a QWERTY keyboard with built-in compose key modifier and silkscreened characters on the board for accented characters (capitals included). Not too bad to learn on, and considering that QWERTY would be so prevalent in my life, I think it's a good compromise.

When I was in uni in the 90s and finally ran across an AZERTY keyboard, I literally couldn't use it. Not only is layout different, but the character mod sequence makes no ergonomic sense to me.

NB: fun fact, y a pas de mots qui commencent en C cédille. C'est pas pour dire qu'on a pas besoin de majuscules cédillées. :)

NBB: ¤ is an end-of-cell marker, introduced at the advent of word processors to distinguish newline and carriage returns from the ends of cells in tables. Not sure if it had a meaning before then, but my memory is saying it had something to do with sub-paragraphs.

Aren't the A and Q keys also at terrible positions?

Its pretty funny how the Spain Spanish keyboard has almost every one of these same keys yet isn't insane

You should be able to use the Compose key on Linux for easy typing of accented characters. eg. Compose ' e = é

I hate AZERTY so much it hurts my brains