When comparing AZERTY vs Carpalx QGMLWY, the Slant community recommends Carpalx QGMLWY for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” Carpalx QGMLWY is ranked 15th while AZERTY is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Carpalx QGMLWY is:
Keeps the ZXCV key in the same place as the very common QWERTY keyboard layout. More familiar than even than QGMLWB.
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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 Easier to learn than QGMLWB
Keeps the ZXCV key in the same place as the very common QWERTY keyboard layout. More familiar than even than QGMLWB.
Pro The layout is basically good for most Latin languages
As vowels and consonants are mostly divided between 2 hands and most words in Latin languages are made of 2-letter (consonant+vowel) syllables, the layout keeps it efficiency not only in English, for which it was primarily created, but in other languages too.
Pro It takes much less effort to type than classical layout
The layout effectively combines not only changing hands methods, and rolling fingers as well, that makes typing a real pleasure.
Pro About the same score on the carplax test as the QGMLWB variant
See the source here.
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 Very unpopular
Even rich on keyboard layouts variety Linux distros like Deepin, offering most of existing layouts, doesn't have this one. The situation on Android is not better, moreover if somebody get used to Swift-like keyboards, that do not have this layout, that person will be forced to have a second (e.g. qwerty) layout in mind.
Con Not always worth trying
The layout is great only if somebody uses it daily and a lot, like journalists, bloggers, writers do. In this case inconvenience to install the layout is worth use it. If you primarily use your phone/tablet to write some comments in Internet and other tiny writing tasks having such an unpopular layout on just your PC/laptop could be not justified.