⌨ QWERTY-fr
Keyboard layout based on the QWERTY layout with extra symbols and diacritics so that typing both in French and English is easy and fast. It is also easy to learn!
👉 You can try this keyboard layout online without installing it!
💭 Why?
The official and widely spread keyboard layout in France is AZERTY. Compared to QWERTY, it adds extra letters such as « é » and « ç ». Unfortunately a lot of characters are missing, for example it's impossible to type « É » or « Ç ». It's also impossible to type the French quotation marks (« »), and other special characters such as « œ » and « æ ». French users usually rely on autocorrect to fix the shortcomings of AZERTY, which is unacceptable.
Additionally, AZERTY swaps letters around for no good reason compared to QWERTY — « A » and « Q » are swapped, « W » and « Z » are swapped as well. Almost all symbols are shuffled around as well, and for some reason « ² » has an entire key exclusively dedicated to it (?!).
In turn, a lot of software has incompatible shortcuts and sometimes require to remap everything, which is extremely inconvenient.
In order to fix these issues, QWERTY-fr is a new keyboard layout that is entirely based on QWERTY and brings the best of both worlds — typing English is as fast as before, and extra characters are added so that one can effortlessly type in French (as well German, Spanish, Italian, etc.)
💡 Philosophy overview
This layout is a strict superset of the QWERTY layout. This means that all the keys of the QWERTY layout are kept in the same location. Anyone using a QWERTY layout can type on the QWERTY-fr layout without even knowing that they are not typing on a QWERTY layout.
In order to type special characters with diacritics, there are a few simple rules to know. AltGr corresponds to Option ⌥ on macOS, and Ctrl Alt on Windows (useful if you don't have the AltGr key):
| Diacritic | How to type it |
|---|---|
Grave accent ` |
Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). |
Acute accent ´ |
Press AltGr + key left the corresponding letter (works for the letter e). |
Circumflex ^ |
Press AltGr + key above the corresponding letter (works for letters e, u, i, o and a). |
Diaeresis ¨ |
Press AltGr + key below the corresponding letter (works for letters e, y, u, i, o and a). |
Cedilla ¸ |
Press AltGr + corresponding letter (works for the letter c). |
Ligature œ/æ |
Press AltGr + key right the corresponding letter (works for letters o and a). |
Note: Unlike AZERTY, you can combine all the accentuated letters with Shift ⇧ and Caps Lock. So for example:
- AltGr Shift ⇧ C outputs
Ç. - AltGr Shift ⇧ W outputs
É.
These two letters are impossible to type with an AZERTY layout. But with QWERTY-fr they are easy to type!
Note 2: You can type a non-breaking space by pressing AltGr Space. And a narrow non-breaking space (fr) by pressing AltGr Shift ⇧ Space. Learn about when you should use them when typing French here (fr).
📦 Installation
This keyboard layout is available Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Windows
Download the QWERTY-fr layout, extract it, and run setup.exe.
Mac
Download the QWERTY-fr layout and extract qwerty-fr.bundle to :
/Library/Keyboard Layouts/to install for all users.~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/for user-local installation.
You'll need to restart macOS before using it or otherwise you'll encounter bugs.
Protip: On Apple keyboards the right Option ⌥ key is often hard to access. You can use Karabiner-Elements to switch the right Option ⌥ key with the right Commmand ⌘ key. This makes it easier to type characters!
Linux
Ubuntu / Debian
Download the Linux DEB file and install it.
Note: On Ubuntu and other GNOME-based distributions, you need to disable the Compose key functionality or typing characters with AltGr won't work at all.
Archlinux
There is a user package for this: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xkb-qwerty-fr/
Use your favorite AUR helper to install it. Or in the directory containing the PKGBUILD file, run makepkg -si.
Other distros
You can download the Linux ZIP file and then extract it at the root of your filesystem.
🤝 Contributing
The easiest way to contribute to this project is to spread the word and the website qwerty-fr.org.
If you want to contribute by fixing issues with the layout, adding new keys, etc. we use the following software to edit the layouts:
- Windows: Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (mirror).
- Mac: Ukelele.
- Linux: manually editing files.