Keyboard layout for umlauts and ß with ANSI keyboard

zuglufttier · 30 Mar 2015, 14:51

Ahoi!

I know there are quite a lot of people from Europe around here that use ANSI keyboards or are searching for keyboards with ISO layout in order to create umlauts easily. I thought it might be nice for some people to have some sort of guide for this problem.

Windows users

I guess most of you already know the keyboard layout creator from Microsoft: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx
I created a layout for german users so those don't have to install the keyboard layout creator but just start this program instead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6riaa ... sp=sharing

Log out or reboot and then go to "Regions and Language" in the Control Panel. You should now find a keyboard layout called "US - custom".

If you use the new layout, you can produce the desired letter by pressing Alt Gr + a, u, o or s. I also mapped Alt Gr + e to the Euro symbol €. This should work for most if not all versions of Windows.

Linux users

There's also an easy fix for Linux users, well I used it under FreeBSD but I guess it will work on most systems. You need to have xmodmap installed. Just create or edit .Xmodmap in your home folder with the following content:

Code: Select all

keycode 39 = s S ssharp
keycode 38 = a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode 30 = u U udiaeresis Udiaeresis
keycode 32 = o O odiaeresis Odiaeresis
keycode 26 = e E EuroSign EuroSign

Then call the program when logging into X. I did this via my .xinitrc:

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exec xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap &
#start your window manager as the last program
exec ck-launch-session spectrwm

This will do exactly the same as the solution for Windows.

jou · 30 Mar 2015, 16:08

I'm also an ANSI person myself and I've been using "US Extended" keyboard layout on my Mac (known as "US (Macintosh)" on linux, somebody probably also built this for Windows) to enter umlauts.

Alt-U gets you umlaut as dead key, e.g. Alt-U then U gets you a ü. ß is Alt-S (we don't use that in Switzerland though) and € is Alt-Shift-2. And you can also enter all kinds of characters from many languages.

zuglufttier · 30 Mar 2015, 16:16

The proposed solutions will behave like your Mac then. There exists a US international layout on Windows but that maps ä to Alt Gr + q, ö to Alt Gr + p and ü to Alt Gr + y. Not very intuitive I might remark

Halvar · 30 Mar 2015, 21:40

Because it loosely fits in here, I'll also post the DE-ANSI layout for Windows I built for my SSK. I hope that's OK.

It's a normal DE layout, with just 3 additional AltGr combinations to make up for the missing ISO '<>|' key on an ANSI board:

AltGr + Comma yields '<' (less than)
AltGr + Dot yields '>' (greater than)
AltGr + # yields '|' (pipe)

You can use it if you're using a DE keycap set on an ANSI keyboard, like on this SSK (ignore the APL legends):

: IMG_20140903_211943 (Large).jpg (243.01 KiB) Viewed 3360 times

# and ' are still on the ANSI \| key above Enter, I didn't change that because \ and | are elsewhere in the German layout, and I just don't have a 1.5u #' key cap. If the last sentence sounded crytic, put a DE key set on your ANSI board and you'll know what I mean before you even install the layout...

After unpacking the ZIP file, you can either start setup.exe to install the layout (if you trust me, but why should you?), or load the de-ansi.klc file into MSKLC to modify and compile your own version. In both cases, you'll have to activate the layout in the Windows Control Center after installation.

zuglufttier · 31 Mar 2015, 00:57

The more the merrier!