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Situation : Most of my company's clients speak French, and I prefer a Qwerty keyboard for coding.

And to write proper french, I have to switch to an FR keyboard to type é, à, è...etc.

But, for some reason, I usually forget to switch back to English. Oops ! , for some reason, our fellow french chose to put change Z and W places on the keyboard.

And I end up 'ctrl+W'ing (close) , while in fact I wanted to 'ctrl+Z'ing (undo) .

I did some changes to test my code, and after I accidently closed the whole shit, it turned out that I can't undo it anymore.

Thank you french engineers for this unpleasant headache.

I wonder what they were thinking about when they switched Z and W places ?

Comments
  • 5
    I feel you man...
  • 2
    @dmonkey Thank you ! it happened many times, at least 4 - 5 times a week, sometimes I lose my work, sometimes I just lose the ability to undo.
  • 3
    Yeah I had the same problem, the company where I work is French, and they bought all their hardware from there...
    Fortunately I found a normal qwerty keyboard
  • 1
    @norman70688 I work with both nano and vim , I don't know, although I am a fast typer, I never got confused, because I always look down to see if there is a ^X , ^W ...etc, to decide where I am. But this FR and EN issue always gets me.
  • 2
    @dmonkey So, I am not the only one ! When replying to clients that I see on a daily basis, I don't even switch to Azerty FR keyboard, I just ignore french accents.
  • 1
    Don't know if it can helps but French Canadian uses Qwerty keyboard. It has the same é, à, ç,...
  • 1
    I sympathize greatly and cannot relate. That said I kinda read this as "how dare they deviate from the entirely logical and we'll thought out qwerty! Those keys are like for a reason!" Lol no they aren't.

    Why not code in French layout? Or use AZERTY as your main english? (Just wondering. I'm American and monolingual. Changing layouts is just not something I think about or do)
  • 0
    I guess that came from typewriters, just like the English keyboard layout, and somehow relates to letter distribution being different in French and English.
  • 2
    @Fast-Nop I can't speak to the French layout, but at least for the English layout story goes (this may just be a story. Don't know):

    Type writers sucked in the early days and jammed frequently. If you push two adjacent keys together they catch, or another mechanism freezes if you hit multiple keys too fast. So they designed a layout that was unintuitive, required significant movements to slow typists and separated common diagraphs to prevent catching (ch, ck, sh, in, etc)

    People got used to it and even after type writers got better it was just "the way things are"
  • 1
    @marcoandre1 Oh, really ? Thanks so much, I'll give it a try.
  • 0
    @deadPix3l I don't code in Azerty (Although I can type without looking) for one main reason : most keyboards I use have a long left shift key, so they do not have < and > keys next to 'W' key. , so I use Qwery keyboards as I have these two characters next to 'N' key. And I am used to type '<' and '>' using shift + right hand middle and ring fingers, so that's why I am comfortable with Qwerty keyboard. It is not comfortable to type < and > in Azerty : https://21ovm16sxue3hx71uow26h8s-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/...
  • 0
    @Fast-Nop I agree, but why didn't they think about this case? CTRL+W is dangerous, and should've had some thought invested in.
  • 0
    @deadPix3l Yes, I guess no matter how you look at it, sure you will find issues.
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