My laptop’s keyboard is QWERTY and the OS is configured for that. But when I attach an external AZERTY keyboard, it’s a disaster. Only five keys need to be rearranged (Q, W, A, Z, M), or so it seems superficially. But the punctuation is all wrong. It’s not just an arrangement problem but in fact the ISO standard uses different symbols. And worse, some symbols are shared on a single ISO AZERTY key but are separate keys on a QWERTY and vice-versa.

How did this get so fucked up? I saw an old mechanical typewriter at a street market recently – AZERTY! I did not realise the deviation went so far back.

Anyway, what are the fixes? On linux there is a package called keyd where you can remap any key to what you want. So I could arrange the punctuation keys match the QWERTY layout as much as possible then use keyd to hack the differences. But this suffers from a few of the punctuation keys being useless. And consider how bizarre it is that the left parenthsis is shared with the digit 5, but the right parenthsis is on a separate unnumbered key nowhere near the left parenthesis. WTF.

So paint? Stickers? Is that what we’re left with?

Most people would just buy the keyboard they want and throw away the functional keyboard they don’t. Which is how I ended up with a few AZERTY keyboards… rescues from illegal curbside dumping. As a fellow dumpster-diving pro-environment scrounger, I cannot bring myself to buy a keyboard.

We could really use a few international open standards that define the shape of the key to board mating connection, so we can pop-off the few useless keys and harvest the needed keys from other throw-away keyboards. Probably countless keyboards are being trashed because 1 key goes bad.