Hello, I'm living in France and I made the switch to qwerty and it was one of my best work-hacks in my live (after learning touch typing). It took around 3 weeks to get used. The advantage is soo huge! Just to take your fears - I'm a heavy VI user and I have to say after switching to qwerty you will get to love VI even more. Not even talking about programming.
Regarding your concern with accents: Under Linux I am using English (International with AltGr dead keys) which allows me to compose accents by pressing AltGr then the key(s) that represent the accent and then the base character. So for à I press AltGr+Backtick and then 'a'. The advantage is that it gives me all of the accents that I need in Europe - there is no problem in writing German äÄöÖüÜß, and even for French you can easily have a œ in cœur - I would not even know how to get this one on an azerty keyboard.
For Windows there is as well a possibility to install this layout.
The other advantage is, that if you work a lot with different countries - I am remotely often on customer's computers via different remote sessions - then no matter what country, you always have qwerty - on Windows it's normally just one Alt+Shift away.
Definitely good investment and I will not go back (by the way I had to learn 3 layouts in my life - German, then French and now I am so happy with qwerty.
Has nobody made a kind of autocorrect that just adds accents and such? Of course you’d sometimes have to fix them yourself, but my experience so far learning French on an iPad (coming from English and not wanting to learn a new keyboard too) has been that this ought to be a reasonable approach.
I like the idea, actually. But I can guarantee that given how teachers/parents/old people always complain that young french people can't write french properly, they would brutally yell at this idea :)
Regarding your concern with accents: Under Linux I am using English (International with AltGr dead keys) which allows me to compose accents by pressing AltGr then the key(s) that represent the accent and then the base character. So for à I press AltGr+Backtick and then 'a'. The advantage is that it gives me all of the accents that I need in Europe - there is no problem in writing German äÄöÖüÜß, and even for French you can easily have a œ in cœur - I would not even know how to get this one on an azerty keyboard.
For Windows there is as well a possibility to install this layout.
The other advantage is, that if you work a lot with different countries - I am remotely often on customer's computers via different remote sessions - then no matter what country, you always have qwerty - on Windows it's normally just one Alt+Shift away.
Definitely good investment and I will not go back (by the way I had to learn 3 layouts in my life - German, then French and now I am so happy with qwerty.