Azerty-keyboard and coding.
Hi, a bit of a strange question maybe but I’m looking for advice. I’m a Dutch-speaking Belgian and we use the French-AZERTY-keyboard but with a point (so not even the French-French AZERTY keyboard). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Belgian_keyboard_layout.png (note: on my iPad I don’t even have curly braces or brackets).
The problem is: a lot of the symbols in today’s programming are or difficult to access quickly or not even on the keyboard like the curly braces {} or the brackets [] and most importantly backticks (!!) . Does anyone has a good suggestion for me to get me coding faster or recommend an azerty keyboard for coders or something? (I can’t find one really). Also for JavaScript, it’s a mess.
I could off course start using a QWERTY keyboard but in my laptop or IPad I can’t easily switch it and it would take me some time to accommodate to this plus: all the other keyboards in this part of the country are AZERTY, so it would be a challenge. Does any one has a couple of good tips and tricks, a keyboard that they recommend, … To make it extra difficult: i have a Windows PC and a Mac that i both want to use for coding.. So even messier 🙂
I now use an extra keyboard with 9 keys from Vaydeer, and although it works: the settings are different for Mac and Windows and it is not so efficient to have an extra keyboard that you constantly have to use and every time it takes you ‘out of the flow’. I tried shortcuts too, but it’s still messy cause there will always be conflicts with a program (especially VS Code) that has already so many shortcuts.
1 Reply
Since computers were developed in English-speaking countries, it works out very nicely for the English layout. I suggest you change your keyboard input language to English while programming. The keyboard layout is one thing, the physical position of certain keys, but the language input is another. I've used many, many keyboards over the years including AZERTY layouts as I've moved quite a bit. It doesn't matter to me anymore as I always switch the language to English and only switch back to Portuguese, Spanish, French or whatever, when I need to.
The keyboard shortcut is
Win + Space, once you have it setup you can cycle though whatever languages you want very easily.