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108 comments
Wandrecanada

@mathewi I learned the arcane arts of alt + 0233 in the 1990s.

There are some who say this hidden apocrypha can still be deciphered in the scrolls of Character Map.

Praise the Omnissiah!

Tor Lillqvist

@wandrecanada @mathewi Why do it simply when you can do it in a complicated and mysterious fashion, you mean? Are there really no keyboard layouts for English in Windows that would provide dead diacritics or other trivial and mnemonic way to get common accented letters? Numeric codes are so last century. Sorry.

Wandrecanada

@tml @mathewi I'm being very tongue in cheek about the old work arounds for non english language supports.

It used to be a major pain in the petoot to switch keybaord language modes. For anyone in Canada trying to type in French we had to learn the char map codes for non English characters or just omit accents.

Wandrecanada

@tml @mathewi There was in fact an alternate French Canadian keyboard layout. It forced the relocation of some punctuation.

This was fine if you owned hardware that matched the layout. Unfortunately most keyboards were in schools or workplaces. So eng was default and cheaper.

GunChleoc

@wandrecanada @tml @mathewi Instructions to install keyboard layouts with accented letters: igaidhlig.net/en/category/acce

Of course, getting these layouts installed in school networks can be a problem, especially when they have been outsourced...

EvilKiru

@gunchleoc @wandrecanada @tml @mathewi After installing a second keyboard/language layout, you can hold down right-Alt and Shift to switch between them (I have ENG and ISL installed and I just discovered that you can press the Windows key and space together instead). Then I just hit the accent key followed by the character I want accented. Alternately, you can pop up the on-screen keyboard (it can be complicated so search for it in the task-bar search field).

Wandrecanada

@EvilKiru @gunchleoc @tml @mathewi Yep all good suggestions. Alt-Shift was added to Win 8 natively and it's a very powerful tool for multi lingual support.

There were some earlier tools around as well but I haven't seen anything from the 90s when it was a pain point for me. I think there were some macro style work arounds?

noodlejetski :verified_gay:

@tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I guess you could map a key to open the Beyoncé Wikipedia article

gkrnours

@tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I remapped caps lock to compose so typing is <caps lock> <'> <e>. It works really well

harper

@gkrnours that's how 'é' is usually typed in ABNT layout (without compose tho)

catch56

@tml @wandrecanada @mathewi you can do it with alt gr but I didn't learn about this until I was setting up a mechanical keyboard for the first time and it requires specific keyboard layouts to be selected to get the extra layer of diacritics.

catch56

@tml @wandrecanada @mathewi sorry missed the 'in Windows' no idea if there is an equivalent.

ElHombreMalo

@wandrecanada @mathewi the first computer i had connected to a modem wouldn't type "@". It was in the keyboard but the old shoebox wouldn't recognize it. So i used to copy email addresses and "trim" the @ to reuse it.

Then I learned the alt+shift thing

petur 🔵😶

@wandrecanada @mathewi alt 130 in this case, those were the days... My mind still mentions 225 when I see ß

webhat

@wandrecanada @mathewi I recently discovered that that was only possible from the numeric keypad

Wandrecanada

@webhat @mathewi Wow yeah I forgot it required the extended keyboard num pad to function!

Paul McGrane

@mathewi does Apple have a patent on the clever dead-keys system? Even if they did, it's been in use for well over 35 years.

option ⌥ e then e = é

PetterOfCats

@pmcg @mathewi (edit: this is for Apple OS devices) you can also just press and hold the “e” and the entire optional accents appear.
(Edit: this works for nearly all characters on the keyboard to access alternate characters)

Nonya Bidniss 🥥🌴

@PetterOfCats @pmcg @mathewi I just tried this in Notepad and Word and all it did was produce an endless string of e's.
I use the Character Map, I always have it pinned to my taskbar.

PetterOfCats

@Nonya_Bidniss @pmcg "Character Map and Notepad", I can only assume you tried it on Windows. We were speaking of Apple devices. sorry for the confusion. I should have been more clear.

Nonya Bidniss 🥥🌴

@PetterOfCats @pmcg Ok, sorry. The original post was about Windows and I missed the bit where the discussion became about Apple. I see it now. 😏 p.s. Windows sucks

PetterOfCats

@Nonya_Bidniss @pmcg lol I agree. Thank you for pointing out. I’ve edited my post so it won’t confuse anyone (hopefully).

Paul McGrane

@PetterOfCats @Nonya_Bidniss yeah what I am talking about is the old-fashioned way like from Mac OS 7 (and well before that).

If you want to push and hold on it, that is the iPad way.

There are ways to toggle them in System Preferences … errrrrrrr System Systems.

sidereal

@pmcg @PetterOfCats @Nonya_Bidniss However, it still works in current versions of OSX.

Growing up as an Apple guy I've always been floored that Windows and Linux don't just do this. This is like a very basic functionality of computers.

Walter Tross

@PetterOfCats @pmcg @mathewi There's one place I know of where holding down a key repeats it instead of pulling up the alternate chars: the #Mac's Terminal. But dead-key accents still work.
#Windows completely lacking a decent way of accessing diacritics is just BS.

Paul McGrane

@waltertross @PetterOfCats @mathewi on MacOS it is a system setting where you can choose not to have it behave like an iPhone keyboard. Although in recent OS Settings app, I can't remember where it is.

Paul McGrane

@atzanteol @mathewi yeah similar. I use Linux sometimes but I am not familiar with that. Does it (probably does) rely on the windowing server?

Atz

@pmcg @mathewi

Yeah - there used to be an actual "compose" key on old Unix keyboards. But these days you tend to re-map something like "caps lock" to the compose key because "caps lock" is just useless.

Adrianna Pińska

@atzanteol @pmcg @mathewi There's a perfectly good useless key with four mysterious squares on it in between my ctrl and alt. :blobfoxdealwithitfingerguns:

artemist

@pmcg @mathewi IMO the easiest to understand method is the "compose key", where e.g. compose ' e turns into é. It's been around since 1983 but only really appeared on Unix and Linux

bhtooefr

@pmcg @mathewi http://andrewdunning.ca/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows/ is a thing (being a MSKLC-generated layout, though, it doesn’t have an ARM64 version, only x86, AMD64, and Itanium)

drukac

@pmcg @mathewi
1. Dead keys were invented on mechanical typewriters so I'm hoping nobody granted Apple a patent on it.

2. I have an iPad with Apple keyboard cover and I can't get dead key to work on it, at least not whilst English is the default language. It uses a more cumbersome system. Apple aren't infalible.

3. You can get dead key mechanics on Windows for various diacritics. It's been there since forever. Set your keyboard language to "United States (International)" and that's it.

@pmcg @mathewi
1. Dead keys were invented on mechanical typewriters so I'm hoping nobody granted Apple a patent on it.

2. I have an iPad with Apple keyboard cover and I can't get dead key to work on it, at least not whilst English is the default language. It uses a more cumbersome system. Apple aren't infalible.

Lula Witzescher

@kkarhan @mathewi

I guess there is something funny in the image?

Dieu

@mathewi #alttext4u

Tweet by Graeme Coleman
@graemecoleman

Hello, my name is Graeme, I have a
PhD in computing, and I am a senior
accessibility consultant, but when I
want to type "é" on a Windows laptop
I go to Beyoncé's Wikipedia page and
copy/paste the letter from there.

Just call me Ash

@hllizi @mathewi

I open Vim, type the digraph and copy-paste that 😅

(I will now see myself to the nearest padded room)

Ben Aveling

@mathewi on windows, I use windows-space to switch to an Irish keyboard, right-alt e, And then windows-space again to switch back. YMMV.

James Britt

@mathewi

I've a text file for stuff like that.

Like for typing an "ß" (which is easy on a phone).

Dr. Juande Santander-Vela

@aunteef @mathewi thanks for that! Apart from having multiple virtual keyboards on my Mac and iOS devices, I also use unicodeit.net when I know the LaTeX equivalent of what I need…

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

@mathewi This was easier back in the day of manual typewriters. So long as you'd specified dead-key accents when you bought yours.

DavidB

@mathewi@journa.host LOL.
French guy here. I came to the US and discovered American keyboard 27 years ago. So... This guy is a sissy.

Here is one é for you.

Here are these guys too: èêçâàùûôî 😉

ferricoxide

@mathewi@journa.host

Up until recently, I had my Windows 11 laptop set up with the "US-International" keyboard-mapping. After a recent update, that mapping seems to have become unavailable. Now all I have is standard "US". So, I can no longer type, say, "-U to get Ü. Instead, I have to remember the damned alt-codes (which, frankly, sucks).

ferricoxide

@mathewi@journa.host

Ah. Looks like they changed "US-International" to be a sub-option for "US". Just had to go into the "US" language and change the keyboard type. So, back to "u getting me ü (etc.).

CannaParts/PitWD

@usul @mathewi

Few days ago I learned from a Canadian, that French should be listed as an ICD-11 disease...

deBaer

@mathewi A PhD in computing and using Windows? Fake News!

Juho Mäntysalo

@mathewi

Thought all keyboards had a committed key for accents, but apparently not.

Johan Pelck Olsen

@Gurre @iju @mathewi except if you like using brackets without breaking your wrist

Gurre Vildskägg

@jpelckolsen @iju @mathewi two-handed typing!
But, yeah. Not a coder's ideal layout.

CannaParts/PitWD

@iju @mathewi

Oh, the Danish one was for now the very best foreign one for me. Already equal used to use US and German keyboard, the DK was a dream...

All keyboards in my electric workspace are still Danish - I left DK +2 years ago.

caravantravellers 🌈

@mathewi Just use a European keyboard. You will still find all characters as usual. Brackets, braces and backslash need some AltGr combination though.

European keyboards are 105 keys, US ones are 104.

Regionales Retro-Rechenzentrum

@mathewi On a Mac SE from 1987 with System 5 or 6 you could just type ´ and e to get é.

Choose your tool chain wisely.

#retrocomputing #blastfromthepast #mac68k

F4GRX Sébastien

@3rz @mathewi i do that daily with an international keyboard map on debian 12 (also works on win10 btw...)

Bill's in the shop for repairs

@mathewi I have yet to figure out why it turns off sometimes, but a! long-press on most letters on Mac and Android keyboards produces a selection list of accented, diacritics, and ligatures... No emoji yet, but I'm sure someone's working on it 😉

C.Suthorn :prn:

@mathewi

Und ich hatte mich gewundert, warum Beyoncé so bekannt ist. Liegt gar nicht an der Musik, sondern an der Tastatur.

Xavier "almost bike mechanic"

@mathewi I was doing the same for years and I discovered Microsoft PowerToys a few month ago 😅

Daniël Franke 🏳️‍🌈

@mathewi And this is why I use the altgr-intl keyboard layout.

joui

@mathewi Week 6 of 8 in #Montpellier levelling up my French and enjoying the convenience that is the Compose key. I have witnessed teachers resort to copier coller as fallback, websites usually have some form of screen keyboard. I would like to suggest multi language support (as in "I permanently use more than one") as one major unsolved CS issues right behind the Top Three cache invalidation, naming things, Unicode and off-by-one errors 🤡

Erkhyan

@mathewi Hold your pitchforks, but I’m a French-speaker using a Windows computer, and ironically the easiest access I’ve ever had to French diacritics was on an International English keyboard layout.

Also, WinCompose is nice.

J. R. DePriest :verified_trans: :donor: :Moopsy: :EA DATA. SF:

@mathewi

Every time I want to type a ° I have to open up charmap. It's easier to just type out the entire word.
I'd love pop-up options to pick alt-letters like I can already do on my phone keyboard.
I understand Apple can do it on the desktop. Why not Microsoft?

Hilary

@mathewi
On my phone this is easy, but my husband, whose name includes an é, tried to teach me how to do it on the laptop........ I just use copy-paste instead

Agnes Kiss

@mathewi an easier way would be to learn to type in Hungarian :-)

Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

@mathewi I was about to be all wtf - but apparently with the US layout it's not possible. Didn't know they didn't have the Alt Gr Key - AltGr + E = É in the UK layout.

synlogic

@mathewi galaxy brain: just type e. let all the euro-fancy variants die out. if it aint on a PC keyboard let it die. adds no useful signal anyway

Dumbledope

@mathewi
This is why, although I have never lived in America, I only use a qwerty US keyboard and have alternate mappings for US and US-Intl, which lets me compose all the accented characters I need.

And for those hard to find weird and wonderful symbols my Linux box lets me use ctrl-shift-u<unicode value><ret>. No idea how to do that on windows.

Christian Lynbech

@mathewi @bsdphk Geez guys, how hard can it be, just fire up emacs and type: C-x 8 ‘ e

🙃

DELETED

@mathewi I configged my keyboard to French layout back in '96. It's not hard and a bonus is that you can still type in English on it!!

Rudy

@mathewi somebody should tell this nice CSc PhD about ALT-0-2-3-3

Stephen Hayes

@mathewi

I do something like that when Alt-130 doesn't work.

ЯØ81И

@mathewi more fun and games with the not so wonderful world of Microsoft.

Brar Piening

@mathewi I have a colleague from Turkey who's name contains a "ğ".
I have a file with her name stored on my desktop from which I copy-paste it whenever I need to write it.

Mireya Strife

@mathewi the European keyboard layout is my solution for this, specially for us bilinguals.

Steffo

@mathewi i have é on my keyboard :neocat_evil_3c:

Matthew Abbott

@mathewi @genegoykhman I found a PowerToys tool that gives windows the ability to do “hold down key for similar symbols” a la macOS. Unfortunately, it didn’t know to disable when a game is in the foreground, so sustained movement would regularly trigger the function and stop me mid-step…

Gene Goykhman

@matt hah I set up AutoHotKey in Windows to remap a mouse button or something but for some reason it caused me to negligently throw a grenade every time I loaded into a Crucible match. Took me months to figure out what was happening.

Rupert Reynolds

@mathewi Any time I want accented characters, I start with a long press on an Android keyboard. If that doesn't help, I use the Charm app on Android.

If I want the character on the laptop, I e-mail it to myself from the phone :-)

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