Thought I'd start a thread for other azerty users documenting what works and doesn't, and let Zep knows he has at least one guinea pig handy for testing :D

So, what works:

• code input is mostly fine, keyboard is recognized in azerty mode with a few caveats
• "game mode" (when running cartridges) changes the input to qwerty (Z is remapped to W, Q to A...) which is actually cool since we get the same layout as qwerty users for playing.

What doesn't:

• accented vowels ("é","à","è"...). Those glyphs aren't available in pico-8 anyway afaik.
• several potentially useful glyphs: "&", "#","|","`","\","@","$",";". Those can be cut/pasted from a text editor.
• curly braces "{}" and square brackets "[]". Can be cut/pasted as well.

TL;DR: Pico-8 is mostly usable for AZERTY-using devs (as long as you don't mind a bit of copy/pasting), and you can play the games without issues.

Hi,
I am also using an azerty keyboard (French one).

I don't know about Linux or MacOS, bur under Windows there is a nice keyboard shortcut to switch between azerty and qwerty: Alt-shift.

I use it in the code input mode when I need to insert curly braces "{}" and square brackets "[]":

• Alt-shift (switch to qwerty)
• '^' key for '['
• '$' key for ']'
• Shift+'^' key for '{'
• Shift+'$' key for '}'
• Alt-shift (back to azerty)

Of course a full azerty support would be welcome but this is a nice work-around.

A really nice layout is "US international". It's basically a US layout but with some dead keys(',`,^,~) for diacritics and some Alt Gr combinations that allow you to input characters from most european languages.

Writing code and using a CLI became much more comfortable and quicker since I started using it and the only reason I keep the Spanish layout as an option is in case someone else needs to use the computer.

Ah, thanks for mentioning the alt-shift trick, forgot to add it to the main post. I'll have a look at US international, sounds interesting!

Long term I think it would be a good idea to have some way of printing accented characters in game? Customisable char set maybe?