Adds modifer keys for accents
- Install autohotkey
- Grab the accents.ahk autohotkey script and run it
The script uses the numbers 1-5 as modifers for the accents. The mapping is as follows:
| Accent | Mod Key | Toggle Key | a | e | i | o | u | c |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aigu | 1 | F1 | é | - | - | - | - | - |
| grave | 2 | F2 | à | è | ì | ò | ù | - |
| circonflexe | 3 | F3 | â | ê | ô | î | û | - |
| tréma | 4 | F4 | ä | ë | ï | ö | ü | - |
| cedilla | 5 | F5 | æ | - | » | œ | « | ç |
The cedilla modifer also allows you to type the French ligature characters œ and æ, and guillemet characters « ». Single guillemets ‹ › (sometimes used for quotes in quotes) are capital variations.
The F1-F5 keys function apply the same modification but as a toggle rather than a modifier (think shift vs CapsLock).
All the functionality is gated by a toggle F6 (off by default) so that the normal use of number and other function keys is retrievable.
This is lightyears from a perfect system but it's a first attempt at something actually usable. I'm also not very familiar with Autohotkey so the quality of implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
The existing ways don't really work for me. Any method that makes you do finger gymnastics isn't going to work for normal speed typing.
There are several ways to type French characters:
- From the character map on your system
- From a website e.g. the French Orthography Wiki entry
- From existing text in local files
- Browser extensions
- Alt codes. This requires a keyboard with a numpad and is really cumbersome.
- Changing keyboard layout to BEPO or AZERTY. Learning a new layout is not ideal.
- Autohotkey (Windows)
- Karabiner (macOS)
- WinCompose. Intuitive key combinations for special characters. Here's their cheatsheet for writing French characters. I wasn't a fan of how it worked out of the box. It's meant to be intuitive yet it's order sensitive i.e.
a+`producesᴀwhereas`+aproducesà.
At time of writing these could be installed on Windows by going to Settings -> Time and Language -> Language then under preferred languages clicking on e.g. English (United Kingdom) then clicking Options -> Add a Keyboard and selecting e.g. the extended keyboard. From there you can switch to it with Super + Space.
Extended Keyboard/International Keyboard. Aigu, grave, cedilla all easy with e.g. alt_gr+e, `+e, alt_gr+c respectively, however circumflex is really tricky: requires simultaneous alt_gr+6 shortly followed by the letter. Not forgiving timing or precision wise. Trema is achieved the same way but with 2. Note that pressing all 3 simultaneously does not work. I actually couldn't figure out how to do it and had to resort to asking chatGPT. However I found the most consistent way was to slightly stagger the first two key presses, then hit the third. Unusable. Also lacks the ligature characters æ,œ.
The equivalent US layout is called the US International keyboard. It similarly lacks the ligature characters æ,œ.
Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (Windows) or Ukelele (macoS) if you can be bothered.
There are also existing cross-platform layouts such as qwerty-fr.
On macOS press and hold a key to get a selection of accented variations which are then selected with a number.
I'm convinced at this point that the most straightforward cross-platform solution would be at the hardware level. Both keymapping software such autohotkey and wincompose, and Keyboard layouts need to be developed per-platform, which is certainly doable but not ideal.