26W25 ✠
QWeuRTY: the truly pan-European QWERTY layout
If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on a QWERTZ-based layout and French Canadians use their own QWERTY-based layouts. And even though i’m French, i don’t use AZERTY either.
QWERTY already loads up the left hand, but AZERTY makes things worse by parking the most common accented letter (é) on that side too. (I’ll never understand why anyone thought a “new” AZERTY that crams every accented letter under the left hand would be a great idea.) And don’t get me started on the decision to bump the second most common letter in French (a) off the home row, give one of the least used (z) such a prime spot, and dedicate an entire key to a letter that appears in just one word (ù). It’s one of the daftest layouts around. To make matters worse, most programming languages have been engineered around QWERTY, which makes it the most practical layout for anyone who writes code.
Most QWERTY users i know have chosen the US International layout. It works quite well… provided you only ever type in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Dutch. Speak French or a Scandinavian language, and you’ll be diving into the Opt/AltGr layer constantly. Speak any other language that uses the Latin alphabet, and you’re simply out of luck. And even if you only need the odd accented letter here and there, it’s missing plenty of useful characters whilst still finding room for utterly useless ones like the fi and fl ligatures. So, back when we were all stuck indoors during the worst of the Covid pandemic, i set out to design a more useful international QWERTY layout.
The result is QWeuRTY, the layout i’ve been using for the past five years. From the French ç to the Portuguese ã, the Asturian ḥ to the Icelandic ð, the Spanish ñ to the Irish í, the Swedish å to the Dutch ij, the German ß to the Czech ř, the Polish ł to the Lithuanian ą, the Hungarian ő to the Turkish ı, QWeuRTY lets you type every character in every Latin-script European language straight from a QWERTY keyboard.
Like every other international layout, QWeuRTY leans heavily on dead keys for the most common diacritics:
ˋfor the grave accent and breves;~for the tilde;^for the circumflex;'for the acute and double acute accents;"for the diaeresis and double grave accent;\for the caron;|for the macron and stroked characters;§for the cedilla and the ogonek;- and
±for the dot.
That’s nine dead keys in all – a lot, and still not enough, because a handful of characters from French and the Iberian and Nordic languages don’t fit neatly into any of the accent layers. You’ll find those in the Opt/AltGr layer, alongside the most useful currency, mathematical, and typographical symbols. That means QWeuRTY works best on a 105-key ISO keyboard, though it’ll do in a pinch on a 104-key ANSI one, albeit with reduced functionality.
I’ve not felt the need to tweak QWeuRTY for a year now, so it’s time to set it loose on the linguists, diplomats, and curious polyglots of the world. I also have provisional Colemak and Workman versions working, though i’d like to be sure they’re logical and ergonomic before i hand them over. Either way, i’d love to hear what you think!
BK