macOS keyboard layout for German speaking developers and other power users
English keyboard layouts are great for coding. Special characters such as [], {}, <> and / are easy to type, which speeds up your coding speed.
German keyboard layouts are good for, well, typing German. ä, ö, ü and ß have dedicated keys assigned.
You could decide which one is more important to you. You could even assign a keyboard shortcut to switch between the layouts.
Or, you could use Denglish, which gives you the best of both worlds.
Denglish is based on regular U.S. or British keyboard layouts but gives you direct access to characters needed for typing German:
| You type | You get | Unicode |
|---|---|---|
⌥A |
ä | U+00E4 |
⌥O |
ö | U+00F6 |
⌥U |
ü | U+00FC |
⇧⌥A |
Ä | U+00C4 |
⇧⌥O |
Ö | U+00D6 |
⇧⌥U |
Ü | U+00DC |
⌥S |
ß (unchanged from US/UK layout) | U+00DF |
⇧⌥S |
ẞ (Capital Sharp S / Eszett) | U+1E9E |
You get the convenience of an English keyboard layout yet you can type German at near-native speed. Capital Sharp S isn't even accessible on standard German layouts.
In U.S. and British layouts, ⌥U is assigned to the dead-key state for the diaeresis diacritic (the two dots above the letter used in umlauts). It has been remapped to ^⌥U so other characters such as ë are still available.
The same is true for all other characters that were overwritten by the new mappings, they are all available via ^⌥ and ^⇧⌥.
- Download denglish.dmg and open the image.
- Pick your flavour by opening a folder:
- us and uk are the base layout, either U.S. or British.
- de and at simply have different icons. The layouts are identical.
- Copy both files (.keylayout and .icns) to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts (Library is hidden by default – hold ⌥, then select Finder > Go > Library)
- Activate the new keyboard layout:
- Open System Preferences > Keyboard (Systemeinstellungen > Tastatur).
- Select "Input Sources" ("Eingabequellen")
- Click the
+button - Select "Others" in the left pane
- Select "Denglish" in the right pane
- Click "Add" ("Hinzufügen")
Created using Ukelele, a macOS Unicode Keyboard Layout Editor. It's free and easy to use.