There used to be a program called AllChars which made it easy to type accented letters. For example, if I hit Ctl and released it then typed 'e the result was an acute accented e. It stopped working after Win-7 and has not, as far as I can tell, been upgraded. Is there any good replacement?
I use the built-in US International Keyboard on Windows 10.
These sorts of shortcuts are built into MS Word, but I take it you’re looking for a more general solution?
I used to go to a website that displayed tons of special characters you could just cut and paste them into other documents. I can’t find it now, and all the rest I just tried have images instead of a character table so you can’t just copy a letter. There must be something out there where you can just cut and paste like that, or make your own document to do it.
There is a Character Map utility that does it, but it is hardly suitable for typing text in a language that uses accented characters. For instance, consider something like French where something like one third of the words take at least one accent. It would be nuts to stop to cut and paste the right letter each time.
Ever use alt codes?
https://usefulshortcuts.com/alt-codes/accents-alt-codes.php
I’d love to, but I haven’t had a keyboard with a number pad for over a decade.
On my Android phone, if I press and hold down a letter on the keyboard (instead of just tapping it), I get a small menu of various ways to accent that letter, and I can just tap whichever I want. Sounds like a nice idea for a pc keyboard too, but I haven’t seen it.
I’ve done it without. Look at your keyboard. You may see blue numbers M is 0, J is 1 K is 2… those work with Fn.
So hold Alt + Fn + J, L, M (release) and you should get é
Cool, never knew that! Thanks!
Typically, using the Compose key or international layout the way the OP describes one types the accent before the letter, but it is legitimate to want it the other way around, and such input methods exist. Emacs calls it “postfix”, for example.
@OP besides the suggestions above, you could check whether “freecompose” still works under recent Windows. ETA scratch that, try WinCompose
Option u, then u gives ü on a Mac. There are a bunch of these. `s â ñ. Use keyboard viewer to find them.
This technique also works on my iPhone 8, including the inverted punctuation marks “¡” and “¿” in Spanish.
Interesting, but I don’t have those either.
Why can’t they make the regular number keys work this way?
What device are you typing on? Knowing that might help.
If you don’t have too many of these characters, typing the Alt- (Opt- on Mac) is often the fastest way. I printedthis page, which lists the most common ones, on cardstock and keep it near my computer. I use it fairly often, and have even memorized a few of them.
I usually use the Windows English International (ENG-INTL) keyboard for things like accented letters. Switching back and forth between that and the standard US keyboard (ENG-US) is easy with the Win+Space shortcut.
Another option is to download AutoHotkey. You could program it, for example, to replace (on the fly) the text e-aigu with é and e-grave with è. I don’t actually use AHK for accented letters, but I use it for Greek letters and other symbols. For example, I have programmed it to replace gxi with the Greek letter ξ and 1/2 with ½.
Also works on my iMac desktop keyboard.
I used to use–or try to use–WinCompose but it rarely worked. You were supposed to be able to rt-alt 'e to get acute e, but mostly I got 'e instead. I never heard of autohotkey; maybe I will look into it. I don’t use Word. I could program my editor to do fancy things, but that wouldn’t work when I was posting here for example. Most of my writing is in TeX where /'e will produce an acute e. The trouble with using the number keypad, aside from the fact that I mostly have it locked out, is that then I would have to remember the key sequences, a total pain. Ah for the days of All-Chars.
Isn’t that page the same as using the number pad? Which I don’t have on either a Dell or Mac laptop or on the ergonomic keyboard for my PC desktop.
The OPT and OPT+SHIFT combination on a Mac will produce many common accented characters. But I don’t see any equivalent of that on a PC without a number pad.