Keyboard Layouts for Accents

Users discuss challenges and solutions for typing accented characters and special symbols using various keyboard layouts like US International, AltGr, dead keys, and compose keys, especially on non-English layouts such as AZERTY, QWERTZ, and multilingual setups for programming and multilingual typing.

📉 Falling 0.4x Hardware
1,941
Comments
19
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#2948
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2008
5
2009
9
2010
33
2011
45
2012
81
2013
90
2014
86
2015
93
2016
137
2017
106
2018
56
2019
98
2020
177
2021
275
2022
159
2023
223
2024
129
2025
135
2026
4

Keywords

AltGr X11 MS US e.g P.S EN azerty.fr TTY ASCII layout keyboard keyboards key international compose keys accents alt characters

Sample Comments

mavhc Aug 18, 2021 View on HN

It is weird it's not altgr-' and altgr-^ that activate accents.

NetStrikeForce Jan 28, 2016 View on HN

You might want to switch to the Spanish keyboard. It's qwerty and has easy access to accents, plus ç (and ñ that you don't need anyway :))

airstrike Apr 4, 2021 View on HN

Seems weird to have specific keys for à é è when you could just combine them e.g. '+a '+e as is the case in the US international keyboards. Ditto for ç

scastiel Nov 15, 2021 View on HN

Have you tried the Canadian-French layout? It’s pretty much what you were looking for ;)

tjoff Apr 25, 2019 View on HN

Unfortunately doesn't work for us that access [ via the AltGr layer. Unless someone knows of a workaround?

Matthias247 Oct 27, 2016 View on HN

On a german keyboard layout that's somewhere between hardly typeable (requires 3 keys) on Mac and impossible on other OSes (Ctrl+AltGr == AltGr == No Ctrl)

corty Apr 8, 2021 View on HN

The fix is to buy US keyboards and configure a compose key for non-a-z characters.

flux_w42 Mar 26, 2012 View on HN

Support for an azerty keyboard would be great :)

BlueTemplar Jul 30, 2022 View on HN

Sounds more like a job for the keyboard layout itself ?https://norme-azerty.fr/en/(With good support for all(?) the Latin-based languages, and also Greek... I kind of wish they had managed to fit Cyrillic on another mode too !)P.S.: better than the old AZERTY for math & code too !

llampx Mar 20, 2019 View on HN

I use US International layout, and Alt Gr (right Alt) + 5 (or maybe 6) works.