1/22/2024 0 Comments Dvorak key![]() ![]() In Microsoft Word (and in most other text-input fields), using the Control key with a key that usually resembles the diacritic (e.g. Now, here’s the thing: the United States – Dvorak layout that comes with Windows does not have any dead keys, so how come I’ve been using them for years in Microsoft Word? Well… Accents in the Spanish – Latin American layout work just like that too. Same goes for the tilde ~ with the only difference that you have to start with Shift + ` to “press” the tilde dead key, and then pressing n produces ñ. For example, the United States – International keyboard layout included in Windows treats the key for a single quote ' as a dead key: press it once and nothing happens, but if you then press a vowel you get an accented vowel (and if you press anything that does not have an accented version, you get the quote followed by whatever character came next, or just the quote if you pressed the space bar as the follow-up character). In a nutshell, there are keyboard layouts that define some of their keys in a way that clicking on them has no immediate effect, and instead they (potentially) modify what happens on the next keystroke. Today I was playing with my new split, mechanical, can-remap-any-keys keyboard (the Dygma Raise, post about that probably coming soon), thinking about setting the Dvorak layout directly on it, and some funky interactions with the Windows keyboard layout made me decide to figure out the issue once and for all.Īnd that’s how I learned about dead keys. It completely breaks my flow while typing, and that’s pretty annoying. So when I’m chatting, doing a browser search, writing code comments in Spanish, etc, I frequently have to switch my keyboard layout within Windows to Spanish (at least I have Win + Space as a shortcut to do that), type my accents, and then go back to my main Dvorak layout. But the same key combinations in any other application, would not work! I would only get unaccented vowels or the letter n. That said, I’ve known for a while that if I’m typing in Microsoft Word with the Dvorak layout, I’m able to use a couple of simple key combinations to type accented characters: Ctrl + ' followed by a vowel will produce the accented vowel, and Ctrl + Shift + ` (which is a ~) followed by n will produce ñ. Importantly, I write following the rules for accenting characters ( á é í ó ú), and we also have the letter ñ, that doesn’t have its own key on the US QWERTY nor the DVORAK layouts, so I also configured the Spanish – Latin American layout so I can switch to it when necessary. Second, my native language is Spanish, and that’s what I type in when chatting with Spanish-speaking friends, among other things. Let’s skip the arguments about it being better than QWERTY or not at this point I just like it, and my subjective experience is enough for me to keep using it (and as a programmer, I’ve found that it does give me easier access to characters that come up frequently when coding). First, for more than 10 years I’ve been using DVORAK as my main keyboard layout. This post requires some quick bit of context. ![]()
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