Typing accented letters

[ScratchNSniff]

I've been writing a lot in french lately, especially emails, and I found it annoying to constantly type é, à, ç, etc.

You can use Alt-codes on some computers, but I find it tedious. I found an extension for the Chrome web browser Accents Plus, free. It works pretty well though I wish there was a hotkey to turn it on and off. they way it works is you press Alt and/or Ctrl after a letter and it switches through accented variations. Not bad, and I've been using it for about a week. I do most of my writing online, so this extension works for me, but I'd like a system wide solution.

What do you use to type characters not on your native keyboard?

[Trellum]

Thankfully I have a laptop that has installed a spanish language pack, so even tho my keyboard doesn't have those characters I can switch back the spanish version by just pressing ALT + SHIFT.  It still is tedious, and nothing beats having a spanish keyboard to type out all the accented letters and some special letters. 

I'm writing english most of the time, so right now I really don't miss all those shortcuts I had with my old spanish keyboard.

[anna3101]

For French, I always add it to the language bar in Windows and switch between keyboards. The only way to make typing easier is, in my view, to learn touch-typing. I don't imagine life without it. It takes some time to learn to touch-type in each new language, especially if there's a big difference, like between Russian and English, but once you've learnt it, it's yours forever. Even if you don't practise for a long time, you pick it up again fairly quickly if you need to.

[宇崎ちゃん]

The most useful keyboard I found for this is the US-International keyboard.
It covers pretty much all western-European languages under the Alt-Gr key (right Alt key).
The downside is, it doesn't cover any Slavic or Asian languages that use the Latin alphabet (like Czech, Polish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc.).

[anna3101]

The most useful keyboard I found for this is the US-International keyboard.
It covers pretty much all western-European languages under the Alt-Gr key (right Alt key).
The downside is, it doesn't cover any Slavic or Asian languages that use the Latin alphabet (like Czech, Polish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc.).

Polish keyboard works perfectly well for English and Polish though. I don't understand why some people here in Poland have both American/UK and Polish keyboards in their language bar? Seems like a waste of Shift-Ctrl to me.

[宇崎ちゃん]

Polish keyboard works perfectly well for English and Polish though. I don't understand why some people here in Poland have both American/UK and Polish keyboards in their language bar? Seems like a waste of Shift-Ctrl to me.

Because you can't make letters like these with US-International:
ą ę ć ś ł ż ń

When I try it any way, I get the following letters instead:
á é © ß ø æ ñ

[anna3101]

But you see, I mean people who are only using Polish and occasionally English in their work.

You could just have Polish keyboard, and that would suffice. You can type Polish letters with alt, and if you want English, you still have the same letters.

But in several offices I've worked I've seen people add both keyboards. When I asked them about it, they'd just say "Well, I don't know... isn't it better to have a separate keyboard for English? Maybe they have something special we don't have in the Polish keyboard".

Do they really have something special? I'm not so sure

[kurdapia]

That is my problem I do not know how to find those special characters and I am just too lazy to use alt codes. I do have a French keyboard but I have not used it yet. Thanks for the Google extension you mentioned I might try that one day. I think that would help me a lot.

[宇崎ちゃん]

But you see, I mean people who are only using Polish and occasionally English in their work.

You could just have Polish keyboard, and that would suffice. You can type Polish letters with alt, and if you want English, you still have the same letters.

But in several offices I've worked I've seen people add both keyboards. When I asked them about it, they'd just say "Well, I don't know... isn't it better to have a separate keyboard for English? Maybe they have something special we don't have in the Polish keyboard".

Do they really have something special? I'm not so sure

The only missing character I can think of is the "euro" sign. But I found it under the Alt + U key on the Polish keyboard earlier today.

[Lingua Franca]

The ideal is to change your keyboard settings and add the language that you intend to use. Windows allows you to have more then one keyboard layout. If you have the possibility to add the symbols onto the keyboard itself, be careful not to cover anything that you might need later. The last thing you want is to have to pull them off and stick them on again.