Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video]

Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by simias on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:36AM (#16264243)

AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.

But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by maeln on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:45AM (#16264274)

On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it.

But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by lloeki on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @08:41AM (#16265156)

> I think it works on Mac OS too

Indeed, same on Apple's "French" keyboard layout, unless you select the "French (numeric)" one, in which case caps lock produces numbers. Also, ` is a dead key, as is ^ and ¨, which works with caps too, but there's no dead key for acute accent (é).

Other bits of trivia:

On macOS, the numeric keypad (if any) is always num-lock'd.

The Apple "French" layouts are vastly different from the PC ones (also available as "French - PC"), relying on visual symbolism for extra glyphs which makes them (sort of) easier to remember:

    option-n is ~ (which turns out to be a dead key)
    option-l is ¬, option-t is †
    option-shift-l is |
    option-( is { and option-shift-( is [
    “smart” ‘quotes’ are on " and ' with option and option-shift
    there are ligatures too: shiftable æ œ ﬁ on option-a o and g
    question and exclamation marks are reversed with option too: ! -> ¡ and ? -> ¿
    option-d is ∂ PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL, option-shift-s is ∑, option-m is µ, option-f is ƒ
    now guess how you do: © ™ ®
    £ gives # when option'd (even though there's a dedicated @+# key)
    shift-- is underscore, option-- is en-dash, option-shift-- is em-dash
    similarly, there's also (grouped per physical key: no mod, shift, option, shift+option):
        < > ≤ ≥
        = + ≠ ±
        : / ÷ \

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by louhike on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:34AM (#16264469)

You can use the following link (in french) to be able to do it on Windows:

http://chrisbertrand.net/fr/articles/clavier_fr_esp_maj.html

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by simias on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @07:42AM (#16264768)

I didn't know about the caps lock method (I always have it remapped to ctrl) but still, it's more like a workaround than a true solution IMO. Using caps lock to capitalize a word doesn't seem very pleasant: "Étant donné..."

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by plopilop on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:20AM (#16264400)

È and À are actually easy to write: the grave accent ` is ALT GR + è, then type your letter.

Special thought for the ù letter, which has its own key even though it's only used in one French word 'où' (ok, we use this word fairly often, but still).

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by baud147258 on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @07:38AM (#16264754)

I learned something today. Thank you.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by moviuro on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:44AM (#16264270)

> You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance

That's a limitation on Windows (and macOS?). On Linux, CAPS LOCK + é = É ; etc.

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Re:Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [... by digi_owl on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @01:23PM (#16267575)

> admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.

More like US layout centric.

EVen the humble unix CLI is a straight pain on anything but a US keyboard, as things like / now require a modifier key.

Funny thing is that There is a variant of the US layout with the right alt being alt-gr, allowing most languages that use latin script to be typed.

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