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Add to SafariWhen comparing AZERTY vs Maltron Letter Layout, the Slant community recommends Maltron Letter Layout for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” Maltron Letter Layout is ranked 14th while AZERTY is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Maltron Letter Layout is:
The comma and period are more frequent than KVJZXQ.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Nearly unavoidable for French people
Most of us learned to type with this kind of keyboard, switching can be hard, and impractical to type French.
Pro HJKL intact for vim
Vim programmers are going to want their navigation keys to relate to each other in a sensible fashion. QWERTY and azerty seem to be the only games in town for this
Pro Punctuation is also optimized
The comma and period are more frequent than KVJZXQ.
Pro E on the thumb
E is the most used English letter by far at almost 13%.
Pro Highly optimized for frequency of use
This includes di- and tri-graphs, as well as the individual letter frequency.
Cons
Con Bad for programming
But you get used to it... :-)
Characters very common in programming languages, like [] {} ~#|`@ are reachable only via the infamous AltGr key on Windows computers (and perhaps Linux ones; not sure for Macs).
With practice, you type them without thinking, but it is still a rather impractical gymnastics.
Con CTRL + / is only accessible by numpad
Con Requires a physical keyboard
The Maltron layout requires an expensive physical Maltron keyboard. Most layout options are a simple change in software, to remap existing keys. (Touch typists mostly don't look at the labels anyway.) But there's no way to add the required thumb keys for this layout in software.
