Like many programmers, I use a US keyboard layout instead of my native German (or Scandinavian) keyboard. This makes programming easier, because I don’t need to put my right hand into contortions to get at the keys for angle brackets, curly braces, or the backslash, and I am able to use my coworkers’computers and vice versa (except for those Dvorak types). But sometimes, I want to write a letter home, and I need the Umlauts and all that other stuff. There are four basic solutions to this, all of which don’t work for me, and the final one that I use today (skip right to the end if that is all you want to see).

The Windows language bar

I could install three keyboard layouts, and switch between them with the Left Alt + Shift macro, as the Windows designers intended. Personally, I hate this, because it’s designed as a per-application setting, but my brain does not remember per-application state. The Alt-Shift combo is one that I frequently hit by accident, and the task bar indicator only shows you its state on hover, while the floating version of the language bar is a huge eyesore.

Key codes

Windows allows you to key in characters by their code point. Alt + 132 is ä, for example. I would have to learn 14 of these three-digit combinations, and they only work on the numeric keypad. This is a serious impediment to typing speed, and in fact it’s easier to remember and faster to type out the HTML entity for each of them. Most laptops, and my FILCO keyboard, do not have a numeric keypad, so that option is out for other reasons, too.

AllChars

For a very long time, I was a huge fan of AllChars, which is a small program that runs in the task bar and adds a “compose” key. So if you wanted to type an ä, you type the sequence ESC " a. Sadly, this little piece of open source magic stopped working reliably with later versions of Windows, and it was causing very erratic behavior, so I had to stop doing that.

US-International keyboard layout

There is a special version of the US English keyboard layout called United States-International. You can install it from the Control Panel, just like you would install a German or Norwegian layout. In this layout, international (mostly Western European) characters are assigned to combinations of Right Alt + character, with special characters roughly located in the vicinity of similar-looking ASCII characters. Ä is Right-Alt + Q, for example. Alternatively, you can compose keys, because a number of keys are “dead keys”: typing ~ + n gives you ñ. I don’t need those dead keys, they get in the way: when trying to type an apostrophe, I need to type the ‘ followed by a space, or I risk it being conjoined with the following character.

International layout without dead keys

Microsoft has published a tool that allows anyone to edit their own keyboard layout, and there is a kind soul who felt the same way that I did about the dead keys, and published his solution. This is the solution I use today, United States-International (no dead keys). It behaves exactly like a US keyboard, with the exception of the Right-Alt key being a modifier to access the international characters. I have this set as my default keyboard layout on all my Windows computers.