How I Have Switched From an Azerty to a Qwerty Keyboard Layout, and How It Has Changed the Way I Use My Mac

This week, I’ve started an experiment. I have ditched the AZERTY keyboard layout (which is widely used in the francophone countries although not in Quebec), and adopted a more conventional QWERTY layout.

(To be precise, I have not adopted the well-known US QWERTY layout, but the Canadian Int’l one. Although it does not vary much, it allows me to write accented characters more easily than the US Int’l layout — it has actual keys for the most common accented vowels rather than ghost keys.)

Thanks to the iPhone and its marvelous on-screen keyboard, I have been using both the QWERTY and AZERTY layouts for two years and half. That resulted in a quite smooth transition as I did most of my English writing with the US keyboard.

Letters like A and M have been the easiest keys to remember and I hardly ever mistype now. Some letters like Q and the newly positioned accented vowels took some time to get used to, but the learning curve has been smooth so far.

I have had a harder time with the punctuation and other non-letter characters. I often find myself typing frenetically every key of my keyboard in order to find the right character, if I do not open the Mac’s virtual keyboard to look at every possible characters.

Moreover, each time I switch from writing in English to writing in French, I usually start to mistype some characters, then my brain adapts and types the right character. It happens every time.

But all in all it has been easier than I thought. If it were not for the keyboard shortcuts…

Indeed, what I have found to be the major annoyance has been my brain’s inability to map the correct keys when using shortcuts. As you know, CMD-A is Select All, but the AZERTY’s CMD-A translates to the QWERTY’s CMD-Q, which quits the app. That means that every time I want to select all, I actually quit the app. How convenient.

The reasons I have changed the keyboard layout are that I have realized I write more often in English than in French now, and that nearly all shortcuts have been thought for and are best-used on a QWERTY keyboard. This last point is particularly true with Photoshop which is barely useable on an AZERTY keyboard, and also is with Espresso TEA actions.

I am not sold yet on how it is helping me code: the upper keys of an AZERTY keyboard have nearly all the characters like the hash, the ampersand, the dollar sign, the parentheses, etc. whereas the QWERTY keyboard requires to use a modifier key for nearly all the same characters.

Only time will tell whether this change was for the good or for the worse. But I will be sure to report here if it proves to be useful, or if I change my mind.

Update: I have now switched to the US Int’l layout since most keys are better placed, especially the square brackets, and the slash and anti-slash, which were pretty difficult to hit and remember when coding.