If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on a QWERTZ-based layout and French Canadians use their own QWERTY-based layouts. And even though i’m French, i don’t use AZERTY either.
QWERTY already loads up the left hand, but AZERTY makes things worse by parking the most common accented letter (é) on that side too. (I’ll never understand why anyone thought a “new” AZERTY that crams every accented letter under the left hand would be a great idea.) And don’t get me started on the decision to bump the second most common letter in French (a) off the home row, give one of the least used (z) such a prime spot, and dedicate an entire key to a letter that appears in just one word (ù). It’s one of the daftest layouts around. To make matters worse, most programming languages have been engineered around QWERTY, which makes it the most practical layout for anyone who writes code.
Most QWERTY users i know have chosen the US International layout. It works quite well… provided you only ever type in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Dutch. Speak French or a Scandinavian language, and you’ll be diving into the Opt/AltGr layer constantly. Speak any other language that uses the Latin alphabet, and you’re simply out of luck. And even if you only need the odd accented letter here and there, it’s missing plenty of useful characters whilst still finding room for utterly useless ones like the fi and fl ligatures. So, back when we were all stuck indoors during the worst of the Covid pandemic, i set out to design a more useful international QWERTY layout.
The result is QWeuRTY, the layout i’ve been using for the past five years. From the French ç to the Portuguese ã, the Asturian ḥ to the Icelandic ð, the Spanish ñ to the Irish í, the Swedish å to the Dutch ij, the German ß to the Czech ř, the Polish ł to the Lithuanian ą, the Hungarian ő to the Turkish ı, QWeuRTY lets you type every character in every Latin-script European language straight from a QWERTY keyboard.
Like every other international layout, QWeuRTY leans heavily on dead keys for the most common diacritics:
ˋfor the grave accent and breves;~for the tilde;^for the circumflex;'for the acute and double acute accents;"for the diaeresis and double grave accent;\for the caron;|for the macron and stroked characters;§for the cedilla and the ogonek;- and
±for the dot.
That’s nine dead keys in all — a lot, and still not enough, because a handful of characters from French and the Iberian and Nordic languages don’t fit neatly into any of the accent layers. You’ll find those in the Opt/AltGr layer, alongside the most useful currency, mathematical, and typographical symbols. That means QWeuRTY works best on a 105-key ISO keyboard, though it’ll do in a pinch on a 104-key ANSI one, albeit with reduced functionality.
I’ve not felt the need to tweak QWeuRTY for a year now, so it’s time to set it loose on the linguists, diplomats, and curious polyglots of the world. I also have provisional Colemak and Workman versions working, though i’d like to be sure they’re logical and ergonomic before i hand them over. Either way, i’d love to hear what you think!
About the Z1NZ0L1N dispatch system
Z1NZ0L1N is a dispatch system operated by Anthony Nelzin-Santos, transmitting from the field since January 2025. This document describes the operator, the protocol’s naming convention, its transmission history, its field office, and how it’s funded.
Operator
Anthony Nelzin-Santos is a writer at heart, teacher by instinct, flâneur by habit. He’s known to wander in search of old shopfronts, to spend an inordinate amount of time curating his music library, to craft pocket notebooks with vintage roadmaps, to keep a collection of half-repaired typewriters and half-empty fountain pens, to wear jeans and hiking shoes all year round, to watch his plants grow, to roam around with the heaviest long-tail bike on the planet, and to acquire more books than can be read. He’s married to the only person willing to put up with all of it.
Naming convention
“Zinzolin” is a shade of purple between lavender-field blue and crushed-blackberry red. The medieval Italians traced it to jujube fruits (giuggiolino). The Mozarabs, were they still around to argue the point, would insist on sesame seeds (djoudjolân) instead. The operator chose it because it’s his favourite colour — partly because it sounds like his name.
Transmission history
The operator was born before the world wide web was invented, but grew up surrounded by computers. He launched his first website in 2000, started his first blog in 2004, recorded his first podcast in 2005, and uploaded his first video in 2006. He went pro in 2008. In 2025, after years spent transmitting in French, the frequency switched to English.
Field office
Z1NZ0L1N is hosted by Infomaniak near Geneva (CH). The operator is based in Lyon (FR) but has also sent dispatches from Aachen (DE), Antwerpen (BE), Besançon (FR), Bruxelles (BE), Liège (BE), Marseille (FR), Moulins-sur-Allier (FR), Paray-le-Monial (FR), Paris (FR), Schaerbeek (BE), Seyssins (FR), Utrecht (NL), and Vienne (FR). He’s made it a goal to visit and write in every country in the European Union (8 down, 19 to go!).
Funding
Z1NZ0L1N is proudly ad-free. The operator covers hosting and the domain name — roughly €120 a year — out of pocket. The best way to support his efforts is to subscribe to the RSS feed and share your favourite dispatches with your friends. That being said, if you ever feel like sending one, a cup of coffee is always welcome.
Colophon
Tools
Notebooks: handmade. Ink: purple, one of many. Pen: a fountain pen, often a Lamy Safari, also one of many. Backup: a Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr. 1 ballpoint, a Uniball Zento Signature rollerball, or a Caran d’Ache 849 mechanical pencil. Notes when the notebook’s out of reach: Bloom. Computer: MacBook Air. Mechanical keyboard: more than one. Writing: Lettera, formerly Ulysses. Coding: BBEdit. Proofing: Antidote. Publication: Hugo.
Blogroll
Inspirations: Aegir, V.H. Belvadi, Ian Betteridge, Mandy Brown, But she’s a girl…, Frank Chimero, Simon Collison, Zinzy Waleson Geene, Josh Ginter, Chris Glass, Piper Haywood, Nick Heer, Jon Hicks, Alan Jacobs, Keenan, Winnie Lim, Tom MacWright, Louie Mantia, Craig Mod, Manuel Moreale, Riccardo Mori, Anders Norén, The Pen Addict, Kev Quirk, Robin Rendle, Melanie Richards, and Mateusz Urbanowicz. Suggestions: please.
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