Day 2/30 – A custom-made keyboard layout is what every language lover needs

If I were to point out one downside of using more than one language on a daily basis, it would be dealing with diacritics. You know, all those cute yet at times annoying "special characters" like the Polish ą and ę, the German ß, the Icelandic þ and ð or the Swedish å – not to mention the Spanish inverted punctuation marks ¡ and ¿. Even in English, there are words like naïve and fiancé, which – if you’re a stickler for proper spelling or just likely to get a small mental orgasm from looking at diereses and accent marks – seem to require more than your standard keyboard has to offer.

If you type in more than one language, you probably deal with this problem by installing multiple keyboard layouts – one for every language you need – and switching as the need arises. This is by far the simplest and most intuitive solution, as neither adding the layouts or switching between them takes much time. But it’s far from perfect, especially when you have to change the language often. When creating a multilingual word list or flashcard deck for your studies, switching between the layouts after each and every entry gets more than annoying. And after a while you’d get confused anyway and stare at the screen blankly, trying to figure out why the right diacritics don’t show up.

It might seem like a minor detail, but it does take a lot of joy out of using the languages you’ve worked so hard on. Is there any way to make it easier?

Of course there is.

Make your own keyboard. One that has everything you need. Including ẘ. I don’t know how useful it is, but it looks cool, and I can type it whenever I want.

 

I never thought I’d recommend a Microsoft product, but there it is – the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. A small, rather obscure, free app in which you can modify an existing layout (the fastest way to enrich your current keyboard with the special characters you need) or create your own one from scratch (more time-consuming, but you can do pretty much anything, including abandoning the good old QWERTY and making a layout that only you will be able to use. Having people try to type on your computer and realize something is horribly wrong – priceless!). You can also add non-letter characters that you’d like to have at hand, such as ‰ or ∞.

The obvious downside is that once you get used to your new keyboard, you won’t be able to type on anything else anymore ;)

What keyboard layout do you use? Do you often switch between languages?