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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

can confirm, it’s the worst

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Those parentheses and brackets are unhinged.

Not really, but I switched from Qwerty to Workman years ago, though I can live with Qwerty if I have to when it’s on someone else’s machine.

I use Workman because I found Colemak rather hard to learn, mostly because of the position of S being one over from where it was on Qwerty.