On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 5:12 AM, Albretch Mueller <[email protected]> wrote:
> Most of the times I type in English so I don't need to worry about > accented characters > > Sometimes I need to write up or edit text in Spanish or German, so I > need to be able to replace accented characters at once. > This is the wrong approach, IMHO. The right approach is to type your Spanish characters using your English layout keyboard. How? simple... switch your keyboard configuration to Spanish-Traditional (in Windows XP to 7, this is done from Control Panel, under "regional settings", click on the "Languages" tab and then on the "details" button. Here is a screenshot: http://ow.ly/i/71NFU >From XP to Win7 I know this works and I have tested it, in Linux it depends on your distro how to make the change. Windows 8 and above it should also work too, but I have no idea if Microsoft has shuffled around the configuration like they often do). When you set up your keyboard layout to be Spanish-Tradtional and your keyboard is of US English layout, the accented characters are easily typed by using the ' character, followed by the letter you want accented. For example to type á I have to type first ´ then a, and it becomes á. To type the ñ character, you just type it directly. The ñ chracter is produced by pressing the ; key (next to the L). You will also notice that in this mode, other two important keys change the character produced, namely < and > which become ; and : But Windows also allows you to configure a hotkey to switch between keyboard layouts, so I set up two layouts, first US/English and second Spanish/Traditional. And I set up the hotkey Ctrl-Shift 1 and Ctrl-Shift-2 to switch between the two. Again, here is a screenshot of what the config looks like: http://ow.ly/i/71NGy Once you get used to this, you'll be switching between the two layouts effortlessly and at will in the middle of your typing without any major interruption or even mouse clicking at all. Note: I live in a Spanish speaking country, Spanish is my native language, yet, I have NEVER owned a Spanish layout keyboard. All my keyboards are of the US English layout. Why? Because the Spanish layout keyboards are a pain to use for programmers like me, the backslash is often in an akward position, and many characters that are used all the time for programming often involve one more keypress or the akward AltGr key to get a character that you get with a single key press in a US English keyboard. Hope this helps. FC -- During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act Durante épocas de Engaño Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un Acto Revolucionario - George Orwell
