I feel with you, but there is a nice solution :-) I moved to France from Germany, I had first to unlearn the German layout (QWERTZ) and then learn the French A

I feel with you, but there is a nice solution :-) I moved to France from Germany, I had first to unlearn the German layout (QWERTZ) and then learn the French AZERTY. But as you say it is so bad! Additionally I was travelling for work and sometimes was exposed to type on different layouts and was very frustrated because I was accustomed to AZERTY. After one week in Russia I took the decision and switched to QWERTY, configured it to US International with AltGR dead keys [1]. This give the advantage, to have all the accents you might, the French, the German ones as well as Turkish and some more by combining. Plus you have the convenience of a keyboard layout that was used to design most of the programming languages. When you are in a front of somebody's French computer - the English layout it is just some clicks away (Left Alt + Left Shift on most Windows). Just to give you some idea of how to get the accents: AltGr + ' + a -> á AltGr + ` + e -> è AltGr + " + e -> ë Shift + AltGr + x -> Œ (I don't even know if it possible to get this one on AZERTY) Shift + AltGr + , -> Ç (This one as well is not possible on AZERT AFAIK. I think for this character the , was used because the key has on the top half '<' and on the bottom half ',' so it resembles ç). With Shift you get the capital letter and without the normal letter. and so on. If you buy ThinkPads you can chose to get the US International keyboard layout. Not so sure about other brands. This was definitely one of the better life hacks for me - I never looked back. [1] On Linux you get the US International AltGr layout shipped. But on Windows there is only a US International, but without AltGr dead key. I find it very disturbing, because for example if you want to type a double quote (") you have to type " + Space and the same for tilde, single quote and back tick. So I had to dig around to find US International AtgGr dead key layout. This comment gives some info and hints to another alternative that I didn't yet try out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10948810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10948810