Request: Review of Framework Laptop 16 Keyboard Layouts

Okay, hear me out… Colemak and it’s variants. (DHk, DHm, Angle mod.)

A creative spoiler

Only being half serious, would be really awesome if Colemak and Dvorak variants would be added, but I fear it’s not very viable, sadly. Just letting you know that there are non-Qwerty users out there. :sweat_smile:

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I can’t see any problems with the Norwegian keyboard😁. Excited for Framework’s next plans😄.

Regarding the French keyboard:

The new French layouts from the 2019 standard NF Z71-300 will soon be included in Windows. Those are the new AZERTY layout as well as a formally standardised version of BÉPO.

These layouts are already in Windows Insider builds, though they are not currently present in retail builds.

With the inclusion of these new layouts, the old French layout will be renamed to “French (Legacy, AZERTY)”. Or in French, « Français (Traditionnel, AZERTY) ».

It’s true that so far, finding keyboard hardware with the new AZERTY layout printed on it is difficult. I hope/expect this will change once retail versions of Windows include the new layout.

The new AZERTY layout changes a lot. Although the letters and numbers remain in the same positions, almost everything else moves. (Even . and , switch keys!) Thus, I think there’s going to have to be a transition period during which keyboards with both old and new layouts are available.

The new AZERTY is already supported by all the Linux distros. So even though Windows doesn’t quite support it yet, you could make a version with a “super” key and call it a Linux option.

For now, making the old French AZERTY layout available is a wise and necessary move. But I do hope Framework will also make the new layout available too. It really is so much better than the old one.

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I agree with this.
At the same time, it hasn’t seen any widespread adoption yet because it’s not printed anywhere so of course no one use it.

Now if that was only me I would prefer the mac Azerty but that’s out of the question I think.

I agree that providing a BEPO alternative would be the best approach.

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I don’t know who uses this much in Portugal, but there is also the £ symbol on the number 3 for the “alt Gr”/“Ctrl+alt” combo

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Oops, you’re right!

For the Danish layout I have found two mistakes:
There is a comma sublegend on the M key, which either should not be there, or have µ as the sublegend.
And while € can be written using alt gr + e it can also be written using alt gr + 5, some Danish keyboards only have € sublegend on the E key, some have it on both E and 5.

Other than that the underscore legend looks a little small and the rest of the keys have the correct legends and placements.

On all keyboards, the Windows logo is the old angled logo from Windows 8 to Windows 10.

It would be good to update this logo to the new flat Windows 11 logo.

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There are some serious errors here. This layout doesn’t correspond to any layout I’ve ever seen. It certainly doesn’t match anything included with Windows. It appears to be a non-standard fusion of the legacy French AZERTY layout with the French Canadian layout.

The two Canadian layouts are the following:

(Sorry for the broken link above. I had to remove spaces because apparently I’m too much of a noob to be allowed to post links.)

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The overall layout is correct, you should change the inscription on the Print Screen button from PRT SCR to STAMP, which is what you actually find on any italian keyboard.

On a side note, Page Up and Page Down are generally noted with PAG and not with PG, it’s not really important of course, it’s just for consistency in this case.

I appreciate asking the community for feedback on this kind of thing!

Is there a reason the shifted symbols are below the non-shifted symbols? I’ve never seen this before and much prefer it like the non-RGB variant. I guess this could just be how the LED under the keys aligns to the symbol, but it’s still off-putting.

Also, is there a reason that no keys are preset next to the arrow keys if they aren’t full-size? My ThinkPad has page up/down keys in those corners that I use those frequently, I think it would be a great use of the empty space.

Also, how are the arrow keys set to work wrt home/end/pageup/pagedown? What button enables that functionality? If it’s fn, is that independent from fnlock?

The only other difference I can see is the numpad not having parentheses keys, but I don’t mind the replacements on the proposed keyboard layout.

Thanks!

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SIAP Re the mute button (in the F1 position, seemingly on every keyboard posted):

I think it is more intuitive to have more detail (“communicative”) here. It could be an x in place of the noise waves, or a diagonal line through it (as shown in this image from Google search) or a few other methods but I would think most users would appreciate this.

image

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Yeah, I agree the French Canadian keyboard looks very odd, and this is not what I’m used to. This one as linked by @DanielJacobs works better, and is the most common in French Canada. The Canadian Multilingual Standard is also a good alternative, but it’s mainly used on Apple Macs and at the government.

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@Matt_Hartley the layout is for czech and slovak(don’t have ě ř) just to know, could it be possible to update the keyboard as on the picture?

i would like more to have ANSI type of keyboard rather than ISO with characters as on the picture

Sweden looks great, still can’t wait to be able to order it :wink:

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Not sure if it’s too late in the game, but “southpaw” numpads, i.e. numpads with the keys mirror-imaged for use with the left hand, are becoming a more common thing in the mechanical keyboard community. It would be really cool to see that made for the Framework, assuming the numpad can actually be installed to the left of the main keyboard.

Here’s an example: SouthPad - Southpaw Mechanical Numberpad featuring USB-C – Logan Butler

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“Programmers tend to write function calls like f(0,2,1) often.”

Not round here they don’t.

Magic numbers smell bad, should be defined as constants with useful names.

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No russian layout?

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Personally, I like Framework’s concept arrow keys with the small blank spaces, that way you don’t have to be precise about tapping them. The full-height side arrow keys look pretty ugly to me.

Looks like pg up and pg dn are alternate inputs on the arrow keys anyway.

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Regarding which layout variant: Had not heard of the new French layout before, after having looked a both; given the option of choosing between the two, I’d go with the more recent NF Z71-300 one.
As adoption of new standards has to start somewhere, would be nice to have the new one, possibly as alternative option.

Regarding the layout as shown in the picture: The “Print Screen” key not having an actual icon compared to the other F-keys in that row makes it look slighly out of place.
Maybe a pictogram of a printer would fit?

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