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I recently started learning Vim and before I go deeper I have a question I need answered.

Using a AZERTY keyboard, should I remap the keys for the commands and shortcuts to fit the position of the keys of a QWERTY keyboard?

I am asking this because obviously quite a lot of thinking must have being put creating thoses commands, and when I see how far the '$' is on a AZERTY keyboard compared to the QWERTY one for example I can't help but think it might feel wrong at some point.

Here is the AZERTY layout: http://www.nathael.org/Data/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.svg

I don't even know if it will be possible to remap the way I would need, basically only remapping for command input, so I need so opinions from the 'pros' and/or azerty users.

Vadim Kotov
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Ark.
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  • I've been using Vim for 5 years with an AZERTY keyboard and didn't encounter a single issue. – romainl Oct 20 '15 at 19:48
  • @romainl you did not remap anything is that right? Everything is a matter of getting used to in the end then? – Ark. Oct 20 '15 at 19:51
  • just to chime in, i've switched to dvorak about 3 years ago, and haven't looked back. I never changed any of the mappings either. In the end, it's all about muscle memory, so i wouldn't fret too much about remapping stuff if there's no really good reason for it – mephisto Oct 21 '15 at 10:00
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    I also use vim with azerty, but I changed my keyboard layout a bit to make it more developer friendly: https://github.com/r03/azerty – roeland Aug 07 '17 at 21:32

2 Answers2

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I also use an azerty keyboard, and I didn't remap the keys in order to fit the qwerty keyboard.

But I take profit of the very easy accessibility of some unused chars, like é, è, à, ç (all the accentuated characters) and have some maps like this:

noremap à @
noremap ç @@
noremap § \

(The last one is so useful that I remapped it outside of Vim, on my linux system-wide keyboard configuration)

But I think that remapping all keys to fit the qwerty keyboard is more a source of confusion, than a good solution.

yolenoyer
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My current remapping for AZERTY in ~/.vimrc:

" 1. Move to the end of the line
noremap m $
" 2. Search backward for the word under the cursor
noremap µ #
" 3. Navigate to the help tag under the cursor
noremap ' <C-]>

Further explanations:

  1. I don't use marks, so decided to remap m in normal mode. This is practical since the m key is just after the movement keys hjkl on the AZERTY keyboard.
  2. µ is on the same key as * which searches forward for the word under the cursor. This is a logical choice, similar to n and N for forward and backward searches.
  3. The key ' is actually the result of pressing CTRL-ù in the terminal. This key is next to m on the keyboard. Its use for tag navigation was inspired by two questions here how do i type CTRL ] on a QUERTZ keyboard and on vi.stackexchange tag navigation using CTRL ] does not work.

In addition, I mapped caps lock to escape at a system level (how to do it in debian). I'm not a really experienced vim user so these mappings are likely to change.

Paul Rougieux
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